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Asked by QueenB to Fiona, Hazel, Jacque, K on 15 Mar 2018.
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K Sasitharan answered on 15 Mar 2018:
Not at all. As scientists we are expected to study whatever is happening in our experiment and show the results. It could be repetitive of what we got earlier, or it could be new, but there is no pressure at all. Its all about doing the right science and getting facts and true results, not good or new results.
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Fiona Macfarlane answered on 15 Mar 2018:
Sometimes you can have deadlines depending on when your funding ends, but often you can ask for more time to get good results. There is no point in trying to get lots of new results if they aren’t correct!
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Hazel Gibson answered on 16 Mar 2018:
I would say in science quite often there is pressure to test new ideas. One of the ways scientists are judged is by how they publish their results in special journals, and some journals prefer to publish new results than re-tests of old results (unless the new test disproves the old result). This can be bad for science because the point of science is that the more people who test an idea and get the same result make the idea more likely – more robust shall we say. If you think about your science classes it’s much more fun to test an idea where you don’t know what the answer is, like finding out DNA, than to test an idea that pretty much everyone knows already – like gravity. Imagine you had to go home and tell your parent/guardian about one of these: ‘I found out my DNA!!’ versus ‘Gravity exists!!” which one do you think they would be more excited about?! That is the problem with science. Testing old ideas is just as important as finding new ones,but it is much less shiny.
However once your experiment has started you have to report the results as you find them – that way there are not any ‘new’ results in an experiment, only -results-.
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