Learning from Failure

So often we tell our students, the best way to learn is to try something and fail.  Learning from failure is the truest type of learning.

Mostly, they simply don't believe us for we have scaffolded lessons and learning in such a way that at each step along their learning path, they proceed with confidence.  Down the carefully manicured walkway that we have prepared for them, they blithely stroll - unaware that their lack of struggle is a lack of learning.  Then they wonder why they must work so hard the night before the test to prepare.

Just as the learning of science must include many failures, so too does the progress of science itself.  Consider the following two famous "fails" in physics:
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In 1887, two experimentalists set out to monitor tiny changes in the speed of light as the Earth changed directions.  At the time, it was understood that light was a wave.  A wave in the aether to be precise.  Try as they might, they could not measure this difference.  They did measurements in the middle of the night on a vibration insulated table in the basement of a stone building during different times of the year, in different directions.  They could only find an effect about 1/40^thof the expected signal.  Eventually they gave up, published their work, and turned to different experiments.

In 1907, Albert Michelson was awarded the Nobel prize "for his optical precision instruments...” and his “failed” experiment (with Edward Morley) is now considered a profound result about the nature of light and one of the supporting pillars of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

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In 1964, two experimentalists were working for Bell Labs to find the source of mysterious radio waves discovered in the upper atmosphere.  In order to even detect these waves, they first had to eliminate all the noise in their radio telescope.  They cooled their telescope down to 4 degrees Kelvin and yet they could not get rid of a persistent signal seemingly coming from everywhere in the sky, day or night.  Frustrated, they could not even begin to analyze the original signals they were supposed to investigate.  

Luckily, a friend of Arno Penzias told him that some cosmologists were proposing that there should be some left over radiation from the Big Bang in the frequency range of their "noise".    In 1978, Penzias and his collaborator Robert Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for their “discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation” now considered to be the most definitive proof of the Big Bang origin of the Universe.