"It's all gone wrong for me"1 - no, not the hungover cry of the ethanol-loving undergraduate, but the familiar wail of another lab cock up.
Mine, sometimes; yours, occasionally; and historic, from time to time.
 
1 Bill Bailey, 2001

This Was Supposed To...

This was supposed to work. It always works - except on stage, before a crowd of interested onlookers, or when you're trying to capture it on camera. The rocket does not go off, the bubbles do not catch fire, the Newtonian fluid does not set, the light bulb does not bounce. They just sit there looking innocently at you whilst you put your hand through a Bunsen burner or into a big vat of custard and smash your props in front of the people who are excitedly waiting to be shown SCIENCE.

Because science doesn't work, that's how it does work. Science is just not 100%. That's why people who don't believe in its theories feel validated. And you have to admire the confidence of the Humphrey Davys, willing to expose themselves to this ridicule. Experiments fail. Especially when everybody is watching.

Is there a scientific explanation for this phenomenon?

Well, no - because every experiment and every example of every experiment is different, uniquely identified along the space time axes. But there are some general explanations that may go part way toward explaining why stuff keeps blowing up in your face - and very much not literally.

1. Your technique. Upon a stage, you will do things differently: sometimes with a flourish, sometimes with hyperbolic vigour - mostly, with over-caution, whether because you're experiencing stage fright, or because you don't want the overflow to end up on your audience. You press things harder, weaker, more suddenly - your hand shakes as you connect parts... and stuff is just that bit more likely to go pear-shaped.


2. Your equipment. If you're not presenting where you practised, you might have different equipment: a table with a dodgy leg, a less pure chemical, or a container with a leak in it. Unlike in your native environment, there also won't be a spare for you to reach for or five minutes for you to take out taping that hole up.

3. Pre-preparation. Because it's unlikely you will be doing an experiment that doesn't require setting up, which you will have done earlier. Probably off-site before transporting your equipment to the stage upon which it is set. It may have got jiggled around a bit. It may just have been left sitting for too long and developed problems such as leaks and tilts.

4. Sod's law. Because probability is just like that, and sometimes you can do everything right, but the time you care most about something working, probability may mean that's the time it all hits the fan, for no good nor foreseeable reason.

5. Psychology. This doesn't actually affect whether your experiment will work or not, it just affects whether you think it has. Before it becomes very confusing (the experiment is a Schrödinger cat: both successful and unsuccessful simultaneously!) - let me simplify: your experiment fails in practise runs all the time, but you don't remember it. It doesn't fail during performance any more often: these are just the ones you do remember.

So really, it's all your fault.

Posted by Rowena Fletcher-Wood on Feb 26, 2014 1:10 PM Europe/London

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