• Question: If you can’t find what you’re looking for, what happens?

    Asked by anon-170091 on 17 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Alena Pance

      Alena Pance answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      Well Paulina, you look again! how many times it’s happened to you that you can’t find something, like a shoe, so you look all over the place and you can’t find it. So then you take a break, and either look again yourself an many times you find it right in the same place you had looked before… or you ask mum to help and you look together or a sibling suggests to look in a place you hadn’t thought of. It’s exactly the same, we look and look differently and we ask for help and look together with our colleagues. Most of the times sooner or later we do find what we’re after… we also tend to go back to basis, which means read and expand our knowledge of the problem because that helps us to look more efficiently.

    • Photo: Gaby Clarke

      Gaby Clarke answered on 30 Jun 2020:

      Hi Paulina, good question 🙂
      Often in science you do not find what you are looking for. Scientists make ‘hypotheses’ at the beginning of their research – essentially what they think will happen. Sometimes our hypotheses come true, but sometimes they don’t! However, finding out that what you thought would happen actually doesn’t happen, known as a ‘negative result’ isn’t as bad as it sounds. It is still very useful to know what doesn’t happen, and there is an effort in science at the moment to still publish these ‘negative results’ in journals so that other scientists can see and try something else!

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