Each week, in the free Metro newspaper is an excellent “science and discovery” feature called “MetroCosm”. It is by Ben Gilliland, whom from what I can remember reading is not a trained scientist at all, but he certainly has a gift for explaining complex scientific ideas clearly and succinctly. He has a web page, which can be found here.
Last week he had a very good article about Dark Matter, the elusive component of the Universe that we think comprises some 85% of all the matter there is, but which only announces itself through its gravitational effects. Finding out what Dark Matter is is one of the many challenges facing physicists and astrophysicists, and Ben talks in this article about the negative results obtained by a recent experiment to detect dark matter particles (the particles called WIMPs, I blogged about them here).
The part of the article I enjoyed the most is the part I have illustrated below, which talks of how science advances through “failure” as much as through success. Really an experiment is never a failure, unless it is done incorrectly. Even results which do not go the way scientists expect means the scientists can learn from the experiment. Thus, the negative results obtained in searching for WIMPs will help scientists refine their future searches, it is not a wasted effort.
As Ben so rightly says, this is like the negative results one obtains in playing hide and seek. If one goes into a room and determines that no-one is there, this may be a “negative result”, but it is not a wasted effort as it tells you that you have already explored that part of the house. In science we explore in experiments what is technically called “parameter space”, which may in this case be the energy of the WIMPs, their mass (which is related to their energy), or the method we are using to detect them (which will depend on how they interact with normal matter).
And, as Ben also says, negative results can sometimes be greeted with even more enthusiasm by the science community than a positive result, as it can point towards a new theory that needs to be developed, possibly uncovering a deeper understanding of the underlying science. So, scientists are amongst the few who can, sometimes, welcome “failure” (negative results). And, without exception, we always learn from our negative results.