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Out of interest, roughly what proportion of experiments in physics "don't work"? Does data that fails to support the experimental hypothesis get published promi

• knzhou 7y ago
  99% of experiments in fundamental physics "don't work" in this sense. All of them get published. If you got funded to build an apparatus, people are going to want to know what you saw. You can check for yourself, by looking at the experimental papers on the arXiv [0]. Every paper here that mentions data, but doesn't have the word "discovery" in the title, is a negative result. There are thousands of such papers. 0: https://arxiv.org/list/hep-ex/current https://arxiv.org/list/hep-ex/current
  • mortenjorck 7y ago
    I suppose you could think of it as an unexplored continent that has very specific requirements to survey each region. You mount an expedition, and you probably just find more trees and brush. The important thing, though, is that now that area is on a map, and the map keeps getting bigger.
• mirimir 7y ago
  I'm having no luck finding any URLs, but if you look at histories of many physical constants, you see that new measurements tend to lie within error ranges of the most recent previous measurements. But occasionally, there's a jump to a substantially different value. The explanation is that scientists debug their setups and equipment until they get a result that's plausible, relative to prior published measurements. Because otherwise, people would be driven to figure out what they did wrong. And it could be embarrassing. But once they do, they tend to stop tweaking, and publish. So it's only scientists who don't manage to get plausible results, and yet are confident that they've debugged well enough, who publish results that end up becoming new standards.