Question: how often do your experiments work?

Ruth Patchett answered on 22 Jun 2016:

Normally when I repeat an experiment that someone has done before or that is very similar to someone elses they work, but not always! Sometimes it’s hard to figure out why it worked for someone else and not for me. When you are making something new it doesn’t always work, or work well the first time. Sometimes it does something quite different from what you were expecting so it “worked” but not in the way I wanted it to.
So when I am doing something new, it will work at least a bit probably just over half the time. But sometimes I do a long series of experiments and the last one doesn’t work which makes it extra frustrating (but also super exciting when it does work!).