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Asked by lumiereclair to Mark, Matthew, Mike, Paul, Sabina on 10 Mar 2014.
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Mark Jackson answered on 10 Mar 2014:
For my worst mistake, I’ll refer you to the event described at http://tinyurl.com/nh7rdbq when I made a minus sign error.
As for my funniest mistake, when I was in elementary school we had just learned about pi. I understood two facts about pi: 1) its decimal expression continued forever, with no repetition in its digits, 2) it was equal to 22/7. The second “fact” was of course wrong: we were given 22/7 as a convenient approximation to pi, not its exact expression. But I didn’t believe fact #1, and so I sat down and used long division to calculate what 22/7 was in decimals. Of course I found that it equaled 3.142857… and then repeated. This confirmed my hunch that it did repeat, and I explained this away as “Mathematicians had only calculated the first 6 digits, they did not bother to go beyond that.” The next day I proudly announced to my classmates and teacher that I had been the first to determine that pi in fact DID repeat, and that my place in scientific history was assured. The teacher smiled as she explained that 22/7 was just an approximation.
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Paul Coxon answered on 10 Mar 2014:
My worst mistake was when I spent all afternoon measuring the light from my phone: http://bit.ly/1ejKtzD
The funniest mistake I made was at school. We were building electronic circuits to learn about capacitors. My school had very very old equipment for physics demonstrations – most of it was 40-50 years old, and were using very old capacitors.
We got the circuit diagram for us to build, and I decided to show off and build the circuit as fast as possible. I switched it on an it sort of worked, so called over the teacher to see: he pointed out that I’d got the capacitor in backwards and it was now getting hot.
As I went to fix my circuit, the capacitor ‘popped’ and sprayed this HORRIBLE jet of fishy-smelling ‘stuff’ all up my shirt. I smelled awful for the rest of the day!
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Matthew Malek answered on 11 Mar 2014:
I’ve been fortunate enough to have not made any truly serious mistakes so far. It helps that I work in collaborations, so I have colleagues who review me work (and I review theirs) before anything is finalised.
But that’s not an answer, so I should pick something.
Probably the worst mistake that I made was when I got to Oxford University to start working on the CRESST dark matter experiment. Before I left, a friend and colleague who worked on a similar project warned me not to get involved with working on the helium dilution refrigerator. He cautioned that they were delicate and tempermental beasts. Well, I got to Oxford and — wouldn’t you know it — on Day One, my new boss told me I should learn to run the helium dilution refrigerator! Oy!
What he didn’t tell me (because nobody knew) was that it was broken! There was a leak in the heat exchanger, so it couldn’t get colder than 0.7 Kelvin. That’s still colder than outer space (2.7 K) and far colder than you usually need for anything… but we wanted to run experiments at 0.005 Kelvin. So 0.7 was not cold enough by a factor of about 100!
After a couple of tries, I suggested we call the company that makes the fridges and have them send over a technicial. My boss said that was too expensive and asked me to try more and more ways of making the fridge work. He assumed that the failure was due to some mistake I had made in my inexperience.
Nine months later (yes NINE), after testing every possibility, we called in a technician. He didn’t need to stay long, because I already knew precisely what the problem was and where it was on the fridge. He just needed to bring the replacement part and install it.
My mistake? I should have insisted harder on getting the technician in much much sooner! Would have saved months of time (and lots of money for our lab).
For funny mistakes? It may be the time that we were doing repair work on the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector. Since the detector is huge and filled with water, we worked in boats. Each day, we did one level and then, at night, the water was drained so we could come back and do the next level on the next day. One day, when we were near the bottom, the gondola (a sort of free floating lift) broke. So when we finished the work, we were stuck at the bottom with no way out. There was no more work to do that day, and the next day’s work was still under water, so we kicked back in our boats and relaxed.
What I didn’t realise was that my hair was dangling over the edge of the boat and so my ponytail was actually touching the water. Just slightly, but it was enough. Super-Kamiokande water is kept ultra-pure — some of the purest water on the planet. When water is THAT pure, it will suck up anything it comes in contact with, by osmosis.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time, and eventually the gondola was fixed and we were able to leave. I went home, ate dinner, went to bed. At about three in the morning, I woke up because my scalp itched like crazy! Worse than ever before, even when I was a kid with chicken pox! It itched so much that it work me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep!
Turns out, the water was so pure that it had effectively used me hair as “straws” to suck nutrients out of my scalp! (Eeeep!) The only way I could get back to sleep was to take a looooong shower and condition my hair thoroughly. That did the trick. Ultimately, no harm done… but it does make for a pretty funny story! 😀
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