Many years ago, a Ph.D. student of mine subtitled his Doctoral dissertation “All My Failures”. Over the years I have come to understand how profoundly on target that statement was.
The nature of successful science is to embrace failure. Sure, we can celebrate the “Eureka” moment, but most of science is about doggedly trying things, and knowing that most of the things you try will fail.
Those failures are at least as important as the occasional successes. If you don’t understand the ways up the mountain that don’t lead to the top, you can’t really understand the mountain.
That student’s thesis was well written not just because he demonstrated some successful results (which he did), but because he also described the places of failure — the many experiments that did not work out. And sometimes it is in the understanding of those places that the deepest truths can be found.