It depends on the experiment and why it went wrong. In some cases you can just quickly fix the problem and try again. In other cases, if a big experiment went badly wrong, you need to spend a lot of time finding out what happened. In such cases, sometimes you learn more than you would have done if everything went as expected.
Spend some time thinking about what needs to be improved – and sometimes thinking more about the unexpected results that the “wrong” experiment threw up and what that new result means.
If it was due to something I did wrong, tidy up and start again! If it’s an unexpected result on the other hand, that’s more interesting – it forces us to think about how our chemistry works, and how that changes our understanding of it.
I would try and understand what went wrong. I’ll try again, making one change, and assess the effect of change, until I can work out why the experiment went wrong.
Try and understand why and then decide if it’s worth repeating. The clues in the name if things were guaranteed to work then they wouldn’t be experiments.
In organic chemistry we tend to use reactions developed before and use them on different starting materials, this doesn’t always work.
It might be that you tried the reaction with and old bottle of reagent so you try a new bottle or change the conditions – heat it up more or for longer.
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