Last Friday, the seventh of October, I attended a four hour AP Chemistry laboratory. Although it may sound long a very long time, the time passed by relatively quickly as we mixed Iron (III) Nitrate and Sodium Hydroxide in order to precipitate Iron (III) Hydroxide.
However, as all science experiments go, my collected data was not at all according to plan.
At first I was very frustrated at this notion. How could I spend 3+ hours in a laboratory performing an experiment to no avail?
But that’s when I made the connection between English class and chemistry:
“A scientist must accept the fact that all his or her work, even beliefs, may break apart upon the sharp edge of a laboratory finding,” (Barry).
A simple excerpt taken from an essay we had analyzed during English had a lot of weight in Chemistry. I realized that science is a dice roll; scientific experimentation won’t always produce the data or information you are seeking. It is the job of a scientist to comprehend what went wrong and why it wrong, not to interpret inaccurate data as a failure. Not everything will fall perfectly in place when experimenting or analyzing the data. Sometimes it’s important to be wrong to learn how to be right.
Even the most experienced scientists can conduct unsuccessful experiments.
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