What the Data Said
The night before the regional science fair, Felix's experiment stopped making sense.
For six weeks he had been growing bean plants under three colors of light, red, blue and green, measuring each seedling every evening with a ruler and recording the numbers in a notebook that was now soft at the corners. His hypothesis was simple: plants under green light would grow the least, because leaves reflect more green light than other colors instead of using it. He had read this in two books and on one website, and he had already pictured a neat bar graph in his head.
But the numbers in the notebook did not match the graph in his head. The green-light beans were not the shortest. They were the tallest: spindly, pale and leaning, but tallest all the same.
"Maybe you measured wrong," his sister June suggested from the doorway. She was sixteen and had won the fair herself two years earlier, a fact she mentioned only about once a week.
"I measured every day," Felix said. "Forty-two days."
"Then maybe the light was wrong."
Felix had thought of that. He had used the same kind of lamp, the same distance and the same number of hours. He had even rotated the trays so no plant was always nearest the window. He stared at his poster board, which still said, in large letters he had stenciled on Sunday, GREEN LIGHT STUNTS GROWTH.
June came in and looked at the plants for a long moment. Then she picked up one of the green-light seedlings and turned it so the lamp shone through its thin, yellowish leaves. "Tall isn't the same as healthy," she said. "Look how weak these are. They're stretching."
Felix felt something click into place. He remembered a paragraph he had skimmed past in one of the books, about seedlings in poor light growing long and thin as they reach for something brighter. Maybe his green-light beans weren't thriving. Maybe they were searching.
It was nearly eleven o'clock. He could not run the experiment again. But he could tell the truth about it.
He peeled the stenciled letters off the poster one by one. In their place he wrote, by hand, UNEXPECTED RESULT: TALLER IS NOT ALWAYS STRONGER. Underneath, he added a new section titled "What I Would Do Next," listing the measurements he wished he had taken: leaf color, stem thickness, the weight of each plant once it was dried.
At the fair, the judge who stopped at his table was a woman with reading glasses pushed up into her gray hair. She read the new title twice. Then she asked him about stem thickness, and leaf color, and why he thought the books had not prepared him for this. They talked for eleven minutes; Felix knew because June timed it from across the aisle.
He did not win first place. He won an honorable mention, and a handwritten note from the judge that he kept pinned above his desk for years. It said: Your hypothesis was wrong, and your science was right.