{"id":4797,"date":"2010-06-24T14:58:53","date_gmt":"2010-06-24T14:58:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/06\/24\/uncomfortable-question-my-bad\/"},"modified":"2010-06-24T14:58:53","modified_gmt":"2010-06-24T14:58:53","slug":"uncomfortable-question-my-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/06\/24\/uncomfortable-question-my-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncomfortable Question: My Bad?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Next in line of questions from readers<\/a>, we have tbell with:<\/p>\n

\n

Since science is a self-correcting process (maybe only at a statistical level, not necessarily an individual level), it would be cool if you would relate the last time you were seriously wrong about some aspect of science or research, and how you altered your thinking as a consequence. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is kind of a tough one to answer, because I’m an experimentalist. Most of the mistakes I make in the process of research are problems of a technical nature, like “I totally thought that would work, but the impedance of the vacuum feed-throughs was too high,” or “I didn’t realize that water cooling this system was going to be such a gigantic pain in the ass, but I’m stuck with this now.” The alteration in thinking required to deal with that sort of thing is pretty trivial, and not remotely philosophical in nature, so it doesn’t feel like a real answer to the question.<\/p>\n

The most spectacular research failure I’ve had recently was a few summers ago, when I had a student working on putting anti-reflection coatings on laser diodes. We were using an old vacuum evaporator system with a molybdenum “boat” that we ran a large current (~100 A) through in order to heat little glass beads to the point where some of the silicon dioxide would boil off and coat the laser mounted about the “boat.”<\/p>\n

My summer student was working on this, and having trouble getting the vacuum down to the minimum pressure we were looking for. I wasn’t too sure about the vacuum gauge we were using, though, and after several passes through the obvious joints and seals with no change in the minimum pressure, I said “Go ahead and turn the current on. Even if the gauge is right, it won’t do anything too bad.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This was a major mistake, because it turns out that when you heat molybdenum in an atmosphere containing oxygen (say, because you have an imperfect vacuum seal somewhere), you can form molybdenum tri-oxide, which melts at a much lower temperature than the pure metal. So, when my student cranked up the current, the “boat” glowed really brightly, then disintegrated. As a bonus, all the glass beads we had been trying to melt vaporized and underwent some sort of chemical reaction that put a thick layer of velvety black soot all over the inside of the bell jar.<\/p>\n

So, you know, I won’t be doing that<\/em> again. Unless for some reason I want smelly black soot all over something, anyway…<\/p>\n

On a more philosophical level, I guess I would point to something I said in my summary post on Many-Worlds<\/a>. Prior to researching it for the book, I had a kind of dim view of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which struck me as needlessly baroque. On reading more about the subject in the process of writing How to Teach Physics to Your Dog<\/cite><\/a>, though, I got a better appreciation of it. Looked at in the right way, it’s actually rather simple and elegant, particularly when you include decoherence. That doesn’t mean it’s right, and doesn’t make me a many-worlds partisan, but I do have a much higher opinion of it than I did previously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Next in line of questions from readers, we have tbell with: Since science is a self-correcting process (maybe only at a statistical level, not necessarily an individual level), it would be cool if you would relate the last time you were seriously wrong about some aspect of science or research, and how you altered your… Continue reading Uncomfortable Question: My Bad?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,7,11,138],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiment","category-physics","category-science","category-theory","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}