If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements.
End of the sixties, Keith Blazey interested me to work on GdAlO3, an antiferromagnet on which he had done optic experiments. This started a fruitful cooperation on magnetic phase diagrams, which eventually brought me into the field of critical phenomena.
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
I always say, ‘Let your experiment speak to you.’ What I mean by that is I – actually, we, or, at least, I’m not smart enough, actually, to guess how nature is working, but by looking and doing the right experiments and paying close attention to the subtleties of it, you start to catch on.
