“Just this week I was chatting with a friend who, over the years, has helped her kids slog through the obligatory science-fair projects.
“The experiments never turned out the way they were supposed to, and so we were always having to fudge the results so that the projects wouldn’t be screwy. I always felt guilty about that dishonesty,” she said, “but now I feel like we were doing real science.””
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This is EXACTLY the WRONG approach to use with any science project! If a science project experiment turns out to give results different from those you expect, the right thing to do is to state your results, then to speculate as to what you may have done incorrectly - own up to the mistakes, and let people know how painstakingly the experiment has to be done to get useful results!
Since my realm has generally been solid chemistry and physics experiments, if I didn’t completely screw up (fail to mix thoroughly, forget to document whether I used inches or cm., etc.) my results have seldom been opposite expected. In Biology or Psychology, etc, it is easy to screw up in ways that you don’t even realize, that result in unexplained data. When that occurs, state what was expected, and what factors that you can imagine may have affected the experiment but that you didn’t control for. Then say the experiment needs to be repeated with “a larger data set”, “more controls”, “more attention to detail”, or whatever else is important.
I was drawn to science as a youngster ... my undergraduate major was chemistry. I am offended by those GW alarmist "scientists" who knowingly have subverted the scientific method ... and especially as it gave cover to dishonest politicians in their quest to promote a leftist political ideology.