Author: Emily Dreyfuss / Source: WIRED
Scientists fail every day. Failure is an essential and inescapable part of scientific research. It’s baked right into the scientific method: observe, measure, hypothesize, and then test.
Of course, that hypothesis is often wrong. When it is, scientists go back, observe more, get new measurements, come up with a new hypothesis, and test again. And again.Despite this, scientific failure is rarely talked about openly, which was why when University of Arizona astrophysicist Erika Hamden used her TED 2019 talk last week to share how her work has been characterized by setback after setback, it felt like a radical act. As she spoke, she seemed at times near tears. And yet the talk, video of which is not currently available on TED’s channels, was not just brave; it was inspiring.
“The reality of my job is that I fail almost all the time and still keep going,” Hamden said on the first day of the weeklong conference that usually celebrates triumph.
Hamden was onstage as part of the fellows cohort for this year, a group of promising change-makers who are on the cusp of reinventing the world. Most people were there to hype up their impressive work, to tell TED why it was so important and incredible that it demanded the world’s attention.
Hamden told the story of a balloon that popped.
The balloon was carrying a telescope that Hamden had been working on for 10 years that fateful evening in September 2018. The telescope is known as the Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon, or FIREBall, and its job is to measure giant hydrogen particles, which astronomers hypothesize pass between galaxies. Seeing them could help scientists understand why galaxies look the way they do, Hamden explained, and could help her to eventually measure every atom that exists. (You know, NBD.)
“FIREBall is weird as far as telescopes go, because it’s not in space and it’s not on the ground,” she said. “Instead it hangs on a cable from a giant balloon and observes for one night only from 130,000 feet in the stratosphere, at the very edge of space.”
One night only. Now you start to see why the balloon popping was such a colossal failure. And it came, Hamden explained, on top of failure after failure leading up to this night. Sensor failures. Mirror failures. Cooling system failures. Calibration failures.
“Failures when you literally least expect them. We had an adorable, but super angry baby falcon that landed on our spectrograph tank one day,” she said, adding that despite the damage the bird did, it was still the greatest day in the history of the project, because adorable baby birb. “Falcon damage fixed, we got it built for an August 2017 launch attempt and then failed to launch due to six weeks of continuous rain in the New Mexico desert.”
And then the skies cleared, and the balloon took flight. “I have this picture that’s taken right around sunset on that day, of our balloon, FIREBall hanging from it, and the nearly full moon, and I love this picture,” she said. “God, I love it. But I look at it and it makes me want to cry. Because when fully inflated, these balloons are spherical. And this one isn’t. It’s shaped like a teardrop, and that’s because there was a hole in it.”
The balloon sank. FIREBall crash-landed in the desert. “We didn’t get the data that we wanted, and at…
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