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I think this is a common problem experienced when documenting the fabrication needs of scientific equipment. I used to work for a lab that had a physicist who w

I think this is a common problem experienced when documenting the fabrication needs of scientific equipment. I used to work for a lab that had a physicist who worked a lot with magnetometers. A magnetometer is literally just a coil of wire around a solid core. How complex could that be to document? Well he mentioned that there was one alloy that they used for pretty much all of the high precision fluxgate magnetometers were constructed from one alloy. The person/team/company that had made this alloy had went belly up and while they published the contents for the alloy they did not publish the exact steps for how they made this alloy. Because of this some research teams had stockpiled some of this material and it had apparently gave them a bit of an edge. We were "lucky" that my coworker knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy in Canada who also had some of this who could build us a magnetometer for our use case as he had some. This is the best article I could find about this: https://www.geosci-instrum-method-data-syst.net/8/227/2019/gi-8-227-2019.pdf https://www.geosci-instrum-method-data-syst.net/8/227/2019/g... This happens because it's almost impossible to write a paper that includes every single detail needed to reproduce your work and fit within any journal's page count limits. For metallurgy it's like trying to write down your family's double chocolate chip cookie recipe except your chocolate chips are atoms, your oven's temperature varies +-500C, and all of your ingredients can spoil when mixed in the wrong order, cooled at the wrong rate, heated at the wrong rate, aren't mixed with trace elements of other ingredients that came in your ingredients, etc. I have no experience with this but I've heard this also applies to chemistry glass blowers: https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/news/20150127/nearly-lost-art-scientific-glassblowing https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/news/20150127/nearly-lost-ar...

deleted 7y ago
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skriticos2 7y ago
Metallurgy is fascinating! This reminds me of the semi-secret one crystal cooling process for airplane turbine segments. The entire thing comes out as one crystal and you need very precise temperature control not just as a whole or in various spots but in various gradients of the oven to get the thing come out properly. It would take anyone forever to replicate this from scratch, even though I can easily explain what the expected end result should look like.
tetris11 7y ago
Add the extra methods to the Supplemental Material then. Science is nothing without reproducibility
- gravypod 7y ago
  Unfortunatelt in my experience, science is nothing without tenure and writing easily reproducible research is not what gets you tenure. Writing many papers with many citations is.
marvin 7y ago
> This happens because it's almost impossible to write a paper that includes every single detail needed to reproduce your work and fit within any journal's page count limits This is a big problem. Storage and distribution is free. Why be limited by the number of pages in a physical journal? Science really needs some proper upheaval, mainly related to the "publish or perish" doctrine.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's not just that. The problem is similar to one known in tech companies. There's lots of operations knowledge that exists only in internal e-mail archives (or God forbid, Slack archives), random scripts on someone's work machine, or that's passed around verbally from employee to employee. People don't have enough time or sense to document this and then maintain the documentation (and like with backups, you don't know if a process is truly documented until you try to recreate it just from that documentation). Then somebody leaves and suddenly work grinds down to a halt for a week, because people try to recreate a small but crucial piece of lost tribal knowledge. Now imagine that, but across more serious domains like metallurgy or jet engine design, and imagine trying to recover that knowledge after the company no longer exists and most employees are either retired or dead. In this there's a sense that "unused muscles atrophy" applies to technology. As a human race, we currently do not have the capability to put a man on the moon. We had it once, but it's gone now.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

skriticos2 7y ago

Metallurgy is fascinating! This reminds me of the semi-secret one crystal cooling process for airplane turbine segments. The entire thing comes out as one crystal and you need very precise temperature control not just as a whole or in various spots but in various gradients of the oven to get the thing come out properly. It would take anyone forever to replicate this from scratch, even though I can easily explain what the expected end result should look like.

tetris11 7y ago

Add the extra methods to the Supplemental Material then. Science is nothing without reproducibility

gravypod 7y ago
Unfortunatelt in my experience, science is nothing without tenure and writing easily reproducible research is not what gets you tenure. Writing many papers with many citations is.

marvin 7y ago

> This happens because it's almost impossible to write a paper that includes every single detail needed to reproduce your work and fit within any journal's page count limits This is a big problem. Storage and distribution is free. Why be limited by the number of pages in a physical journal? Science really needs some proper upheaval, mainly related to the "publish or perish" doctrine.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
It's not just that. The problem is similar to one known in tech companies. There's lots of operations knowledge that exists only in internal e-mail archives (or God forbid, Slack archives), random scripts on someone's work machine, or that's passed around verbally from employee to employee. People don't have enough time or sense to document this and then maintain the documentation (and like with backups, you don't know if a process is truly documented until you try to recreate it just from that documentation). Then somebody leaves and suddenly work grinds down to a halt for a week, because people try to recreate a small but crucial piece of lost tribal knowledge. Now imagine that, but across more serious domains like metallurgy or jet engine design, and imagine trying to recover that knowledge after the company no longer exists and most employees are either retired or dead. In this there's a sense that "unused muscles atrophy" applies to technology. As a human race, we currently do not have the capability to put a man on the moon. We had it once, but it's gone now.