My father is a researcher in electrical engineering. A while ago, he and his colleagues envisioned a method of developing solar panels that could have blown past the efficiency of the day. Only problem is it involved creating and working with very small crystalline structures. Their research into said structures was novel for its time. Turned out once they learned more about the actual physics, the theory behind the panel design broke down and they had to abandon the project.

But was the result useless? Hardly. To this day he gets contacted by scientists from time to time trying to do the same thing and he has to tell them why their plan won’t work.

Preventing people from going down dead ends is valuable, like knowing how to look for the solution to an obscure software error. Or, to paraphrase Edison, it’s knowing ahead of time how not to make a lightbulb.