We all like to celebrate the big news in science.
Black holes are created by ripples in space time. The shadow of a black hole was photographed by us. We were able to figure out how to change the genes. We found the particle that's called the Higgs boson.
We don't usually hear about the years of hard work that results in incomplete results, but that's because they don't give any evidence for the questions scientists ask.
Without non-detections, the progress of science would be slowed and stymied. We are driven forward by null results. They keep us from repeating the same mistakes.
We can learn a lot from nothing.
null results don't usually make it to scientific publications. This can cause significant inefficiencies in the way science is done and it's an indicator of bigger problems in the current scientific publication processes.
Marcus Munaf of the University of Bristol told ScienceAlert that failing to publish null results can have a powerful effect.
It's very easy to generate a null result from a bad experiment. If we were to flood the literature with even more null results, that wouldn't necessarily help the fundamental problem, which is, ultimately, to get the right answers to important questions.
The null hypothesis shows the parameters under which the results of a study would be different from background noise. The signals produced by the waves are very faint, and there are many sources of noise that can affect LIGO's sensors. Once those sources were ruled out, a confirmed detection could be made.
A null result is when those sources can't be ruled out. That doesn't mean that we didn't detect the waves, but we can't say for certain.
An aerial photo of the interferometer. The CCO 1.0 is a collaboration between the Virgo.
null results can be useful in some fields, like astronomy and cosmology, where they help scientists adjust the parameters of future experiments.
null results are less valued in fields where results can be more qualitative.
Munaf said that part of the problem is that we can't make quantitative predictions.
If we don't find evidence that there is an effect, we don't put any parameters on whether or not the effect is small or large. We can't do anything with it.
A null result can yield some amazing findings.
The experiment conducted by Albert A.Michelson and Edward W. Morley is one of the most famous. The pair were trying to detect the speed of our planet with respect to the medium through which light traveled.
As Earth moved through space, they thought that waves of light rippling through a perfectly still still ocean should move at a slightly different speed to those rippling out from right angles. The experiments were ingenious but they didn't find anything, which is why Einstein's special theory of relativity was created.
The inteferometer was designed to detect aether. Albert AbrahamMichelson is in the public domain.
null results can help us design future experiments. The design of the interferometer was improved after years of null detections allowed for the detection of black holes. Physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research have not been able to detect a dark matter signal in particle collision experiments.
"Null experiments are just a small part of the full range of observations," George Smoot III of UC Berkeley told ScienceAlert. "You can see something new and amazing, but you can't see something that isn't amazing."
null results are often easier to interpret when it's all about hard numbers. In other fields, there is little incentive to publish.
Studies that make a significant finding are more likely to be cited, and the implications of non-detection aren't always clear. Positive results are more likely to be published. These are the things that matter when it comes to deciding who gets a research grant.
Many lines of inquiry are being pursued by scientists. Why chase the null hypothesis when you could be using your time doing research that is more likely to be seen and lead to further research opportunities?
To publish or not.
As well as leaving out important context that could help us learn something new about our world, the non-publication of null results can also lead to inefficiency and even discourage young scientists from pursuing a career, as Munaf found first-hand. He was a PhD student when he set about replicating an experiment that had found a certain effect.
It didn't work. I did not find that effect in my experiment. He said that as an early career researcher, you think, "I must have done something wrong, maybe I'm not cut out for this."
I bumped into a senior academic who said no one could duplicate that finding. If you've been in the field long enough, you can find out about this through conversations at conferences. You have to stay in the field for a long time to find that. If you don't have that person tell you that it's not your fault, you might leave the field.
Academic publishing has also been dealing with this problem. The Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine was established in 2002 to encourage the publication of results that might not otherwise see the light of day. Many other journals followed its lead in publishing more articles with negative or null results, so it closed in 2017, claiming to have succeeded in its mission.
Encouraging scientists to bring their negative results to light may not work out well. There's a chance for a lot of poorly conceived, poorly designed, poorly conducted studies. The opposite is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556
The Journal of Business and Psychology published a null results special issue, but received very few submissions. Scientists are conditioned to believe that null results are worthless. The Berlin Institute of Health announced a reward for replication studies, but only received 22 applications.
These attitudes could change. We've seen that it can happen, and we've learned a lot from null detections.
The Crab Nebula is a source of rays. J. Hester and A. Loll are from Arizona State University.
He said that the search for antimatter in the Cosmic rays was a null experiment that convinced him that there was no serious amount of antimatter in our universe.
The next null experiment was testing for the violation of the rotation of the Universe. The null result is very important to our view of the Universe and it was the initial motivation for me to use the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation to observe and measure it. More null results followed, but also some major discoveries.
It may be a slow process. The publication of null results in and of themselves needs to be incentivized in a way that the results can be interpreted and published in their appropriate context. It's a crucial ask that's crucial to scientific progress.
Munaf said getting the right answer to the right question matters.
Sometimes that will mean null results. I think we need to be careful not to make the publication of a null result an end in itself; it's a means to an end if it helps us get to the right answer, but it needs more than just the publication of null results to get there.
"We need better formulated questions and better designed studies so that our results are solid and informative regardless of what they are."
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