• Question: whats your worst invention

    Asked by tarax to Peter, Mark, Katharine, Jony, Ben on 21 Nov 2011. This question was also asked by nerd101.
    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 21 Nov 2011:

      It was when I was doing my PhD and spent a long time redoing something because I thought I could do it better! In the end what I did was pretty much useless(and far worse than what I hopped to replace) and I had to throw it away. Really big waste of time, but it did taught me to make sure I did my research properly in future 🙂

    • Photo: Jony Hudson

      Jony Hudson answered on 21 Nov 2011:

      Great question tarax!

      Like Mark says, when you do research you invent quite a lot of rubbish on the way to making the good stuff. I’m not sure what my worst ever is (so many to choose from!) I did spend six months making a new kind of molecule detector that simply didn’t work at all. That wasn’t very good 🙂

    • Photo: Peter Williams

      Peter Williams answered on 21 Nov 2011:

      I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my work, i’ve not met a scientist yet who doesn’t. The trick is recognising the mistakes, telling everyone affected straight away, correcting it and learning how to avoid it in future.

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