Question: do you feel really excited when you find an unexpected result or novel?

anon answered on 14 Jun 2010:

Good ‘un jellybean! An unexpected result can be extremely exciting if it opens up a new avenue of research or totally explodes somebody else’s theory (Ok that’s a bit mean, I’m far from perfect).

It can also be a disaster. if you’ve done something 5 times and got the same result and then the result suddenly changes on the sixth go, what do you do? You have to be very careful to make sure that you don’t just ignore the result but get to the bottom of why it changed or eventually you’ll be caught out. Sometimes scientists pray to gods they don’t believe in that the sixth result will be the same as the other five!