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Anyone that follows science has to notice that when an experiment is successful, or even partially successful, there is usually an article written about it, a paper published, or the scientists themselves tell us about what they have done. What what about those experiments that are failures? We certainly don't hear much about these experiments and to find anything out about them we usually have to dig. Sometimes a scientific experiment has to be repeated many times before it is even partially successful. Take the case of Dolly the sheep. Dolly was a cloned sheep, when she was created she had a lot of things wrong with her and she didn't last very long. I wonder how many people know that just to reach this stage it took 277 tries? Here is a question for you, would you consider this a successful experiment? This is almost like asking was the glass of water half full or half empty. I look at things this way, the experiments yielded a lot of information that we may be able to use in the future, but the result was not a success.
Light Another experiment which was a failure was conducted in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. This was important because it started what was known as the Second Scientific Revolution. Physicists believed in the 19th century that any type of wave required a medium to move through. When you think of the sea, waves do move through water and we think of sound that moves through water or air. The problem was that these physicists believed that in order for light waves to move, they had to travel through some sort of medium and they believed that this was aether. This would have meant that space itself would have had to contain ether so that the light from stars could reach us. To prove that this was true, an experiment was conducted. A device was constructed to detect aether flow. We all know today light travels through relatively empty space and has no trouble doing it, so of course the experiment was a total failure and the two scientists were not able to prove their theory. This experiment has become known in the scientific community as the most famous failed experiment ever conducted.
Corn Flakes Just because an experiment fails doesn't mean that it is not useful. Sometimes a failed experiment can lead to very useful knowledge, or even the discovery of something else. This something else might even be more useful than what the original experiment was trying to prove. We have to remember that many things have been discovered by accident. Sometimes scientists are looking for one thing and when they couldn't prove it, they came across something else. I'd like to mention something that everybody knows about and that is cornflakes. Cornflakes were discovered by accident by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg who was the superintendent of the Battle Creek sanitarium in Michigan. He was a Seventh Day Adventist who was searching for wholesome foods to feed his patients and these foods had to comply with the Adventist's vegetarian diet. He had left some boiled wheat on the stove and when he came back, it was overcooked. He brought it to a machine that had rollers on it in the hope that he could roll it out into a dough, but instead he got flakes and that is how Kellogg's corn flakes were born. Another experiment that produced unexpected results was conducted by Percy Spencer. In 1945 he was conducting an experiment with a new vacuum tube called a magnetron. While conducting his experiments he noticed that a candy bar that was in his pocket began to melt. This took him by surprise, but being a very resourceful person he then took a bag of popcorn and exposed it to the magnetron and it began to pop. This led to the development of the first microwave oven in 1947. It was a little heavier than the microwaves that we use today, weighing in at 750 pounds, it was a little too big to put under the counter since it was 5 1/2 feet tall and it was a little too expensive at the time, since in 1947 it cost $5000. It took a while before it could be made small enough, light enough and inexpensive enough, to become as we all know it today. A model of a microwave oven appeared in 1967 that could plug into the wall and only cost about $500. One thing that I wonder about is the fact that since Percy Spencer had been exposed to so many microwaves, what damage was done to his body? One area where we have seen a series of failed experiments is in the field of nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion has been a dream of mankind ever since we split the atom and maybe even before. The idea is to create nuclear energy that is completely safe and extremely cheap, unlike the nuclear fission energy that we use today, that can be very dangerous. All sorts of different methods were tried to produce nuclear fusion and even bubbles were used. The idea was bubbles would be created by sending very strong sound waves through acetone, they would then expand and implode at a very high temperature. The problem was that the temperature never got high enough, and is still believed by some scientists that if they can get these temperatures a few million degrees higher, they will be able to induce this fusion. Our own sun is said to run on nuclear fusion by many scientists, but there are those that say that if this were true the sun would have run out of fuel by now.
Coffee Sometimes a survey question can cause years of experimentation. One case in point was a Harvard study that was published in 1981 in The New England Journal of Medicine, where they published a Harvard study that showed a link between pancreatic cancer and coffee drinking. This led to many years of studies and experiments, which then led to the conclusion that coffee does not cause pancreatic cancer. It seems that scientists had wrongly latched on to one answer given to a particular question that was given in a survey that seems to link coffee drinking to this disease, but without testing it, it is surprising that this was published in such a prestigious journal. It is said that this type of research is just put into a box somewhere when it is finished and is wasted, because other data may be able to be taken from it. I guess one could say that if we were to look at all the failed experiments, we might find out that there are far more failed experiments than successful ones. This is the way that we learn and without failed experiments there wouldn't be very many successful ones.
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