Re: why should results of scientific experiment be recorded in detail?

Hello Roni,

Good question! The answer is for 2 reasons: to help you and to help other people.

When you do an experiment, very often you have to do it several times to see if the same thing happens each time. This is called reproducibility, because you want to reproduce the same result. So you must make sure that you do things the same way each time. If you don't record the details, you might forget some of them - for instance details like temperature, time, the concentration of a chemical and so on. If you don't do the experiment exactly the same way each time, your results may mean nothing at all.

Second, it's very important that you can communicate your results to other people. If something happens that you don't understand, someone may be able to help you, but they need to know exactly how you did the experiment. People may also want to repeat your experiment to see if they get the same results, so they should be able to do exactly what you did from what you have written down. And other people may want to analyse and criticise your work, to see if you have made mistakes or interpreted something the wrong way. So they have to be able to understand exactly how you did your experiment, again from what you have recorded.

The ability to record in detail your experiments and to communicate the results is a very important skill which distinguishes the best scientists from the worst. Even professional scientists make terrible mistakes in this area, so I recommend that you learn the skill as early as possible!

Good luck and be critical,
Neil