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Emily Alspector's picture

getting it more right

I think what struck me most about last Thursdays class was the notion that a failed experiment is "worth more" to science as a discipline that a successful one because of the fact that we don't know for sure that running the experiment again will lead to success every time. But if we are using the "you never know" logic, can't the same be said for failed experiments? There are so many things involved with unsuccessful experiments, and there is a lot to learn from them, of course, but many things can be overlooked in trying to explain the failure, which can then lead to miscalculations and misconstrued theories. I guess my point is that I don't really think we should hope for failures in order to further science because both sucessful and unsucessful experiments seem to be potentially useful but also potentially defective. As much as I like the idea of commending being wrong, I don't think we should value it over being right. Just because we may never find "truth", we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that our goal is to get as close as possible, and, in order to do that, need to get some things right.

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