Though it will likely become his thesis either way, which makes it useful to him.
That brings up an interesting question about academics... My understanding is that the traditional standard for a PhD is significantly increasing the breadth of human knowledge (or similar). Can one get a PhD based on a dissertation for an experiment which didn't turn out the way you'd hoped? E.g., could your dissertation's abstract be something like "Theoretical work by Bromstead suggested that under conditions X the standard model predicts result Y, while many other competing theories predict result not-Y. After 3 years of experimental design, building, and data collection and analysis, detailed herein, we conclude that under conditions X, Y happens to within 5sd. Therefore, the standard model is vindicated once again, and new physics is avoided for another day."
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Date: 2010-02-05 12:34 am (UTC)That brings up an interesting question about academics... My understanding is that the traditional standard for a PhD is significantly increasing the breadth of human knowledge (or similar). Can one get a PhD based on a dissertation for an experiment which didn't turn out the way you'd hoped? E.g., could your dissertation's abstract be something like "Theoretical work by Bromstead suggested that under conditions X the standard model predicts result Y, while many other competing theories predict result not-Y. After 3 years of experimental design, building, and data collection and analysis, detailed herein, we conclude that under conditions X, Y happens to within 5sd. Therefore, the standard model is vindicated once again, and new physics is avoided for another day."