Sometimes doing research really cracks me up. Well, it cracks me up in a, “The other option is crying, so I guess I better laugh,” sort of way.

Designing an experiment usually begins with a question. Some previous bit of work has confused you and you want to conduct some more tests to see what’s going on. So you figure out what to do, get the proper training, and get ready to do your experiment.

Before the results come back, you generally think something like, “Either X or Y will happen. If X happens, that implies alpha. If Y happens, that means beta. Awesome. Two possibilities and, when it’s done, I’ll know which one.”

So you run the experiment. More often than not, it shows Z, which seems to imply something really weird like omichron. Or it shows some combination of X and Y which were two things that you previously thought were mutually exclusive. At this point, you’re not even sure that your results are physically possible. This is not unlike the time in my undergraduate circuits class when my lab partner and I were convinced that we had created charge.

After running this experiment and getting Z, naturally, you have to design another experiment to even verify that Z was indeed possible. And, of course, you think that the results will be A or B, but they come out to be C, so you design an experiment to test C, and, eventually, you’ve run out of letters in the alphabet.

I’m not sure, but I *think* that once you’ve run out of letters and you’re at the height of confusion, you’re about ready to graduate.

(This was all based on a recent experiment of mine… though I’m pretty sure that’s transparent.)