• Question: What is the hardest thing about your job?

    Asked by anon-74599 to Sophie on 21 May 2020. This question was also asked by anon-74659.
    • Photo: Sophie Louth

      Sophie Louth answered on 21 May 2020:

      Hi Adam,

      Designing experiments can be pretty tough because you are trying to find out things that nobody knows but you want the answers to be meaningful. If you design it wrong then you can’t tell whether the differences you see in the answer are caused by the change you intended to make or something else.
      For example if I wanted to know which of three ice creams melted fastest I could buy them and time them melting. But if I did each one on a different day then the differences in melting time could be caused by differences in the temperature that day (one hot day, one cold), rather than the different ice creams.

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