More work ramblings
May 19th 2004Wallabynerd alert
Sitting here waiting for the mounting resin to cure for another experiment gives me time to ponder. This is the first experiment in several weeks of working on the test apparatus, and it’s probably been closer to two months since the last time I mounted a specimen. Plenty of little tricks that I’d forgotten - the recipe for the resin and a summary of how to do it are written down, of course, but the details of how to put the tape and how to hold the specimen and the mounting mold and the string and the support stand all at once are difficult to record.
Difficult to reproduce, too, which is something that bothers me. My natural bent, reinforced by four years of undergrad chem labs and four years of working in a purely analytical research lab (instead of analytical-physical as now), is to say that only the stuff that can be repeated, without it mattering who does the experiment, etc., is really “science”. (This isn’t untrue; one of the key requirements for a decent analytical method is that it’s very highly reproducible - it works every time and gives the same answer every time for the same sample.) And now there’s all kinds of experiments, and data analysis, where the results are… subjective, at best. The experiments can’t be done all the exact same way - the specimens are slightly different. SOmetimes the specimen breaks early on in the testing cycle; sometimes it lasts far longer than expected and we have to extend the experiment. The data analysis is done by “hand” - slightly different background correction each time, slightly different curve fitting each time, occasionally different starting parameters for fitting peaks in different spectra in the same experiment…
Now, I understand there’s different standards for different disciplines, and this is biophysics (or something) rather than analytical chemistry. And I’m well aware that experiments don’t work 100% of the time for anyone, etc., etc., etc. But I could wish, when sitting around waiting to see if it’s worked this time or not, that there were more ways to guarantee it’d work.
Update: I could also wish that I’d made sure this actually posted before closing up the laptop and heading out the door, now I have to backdate it. The resin didn’t cure right anyway, it turned rubbery instead. *sighs*