4 ms·
It is hard. In a nearby field, I once spent a few months characterizing a high-precision mechanical high-vacuum pressure sensor, astounded that nobody else had
by ISL 4y ago
It is hard. In a nearby field, I once spent a few months characterizing a high-precision mechanical high-vacuum pressure sensor, astounded that nobody else had done similar work many decades prior.
Turns out I was missing a critical keyword from the early 1900s. All of the researchers in the field from ~1900-1940 used the term "manometer" to refer to even precision vacuum gauges. Once I had it, it unlocked a flood of references to top-notch work.
The real key is a living corpus of scientific knowledge -- people you can ask and solid review papers. It is one of the superpowers of the very-experienced and the well-read to be able to know what has already been done.
If something matters, it will generally get rediscovered in fairly short order. The biggest risk comes with measurements made that either can never be repeated (think changing bio-ethics rules or SN1987A) or can only be repeated at great cost (people are still analyzing high-energy physics experiments from the 1990s and earlier).
- dweekly 4y agoThere's a delightful insight here that I've seen in several different fields, which is not commonly taught in school: when trying to research a thing, first find out what other people have called that thing. When we were researching the possibility of having cell towers on solar planes or blimps, we had trouble locating other efforts to explore the same until we stumbled across the verbiage "High Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS)" and unlocked a wide body of research and people that had investigated exactly this. My best technique so far for doing this is to search in Google scholar for the plain English description of what I'm looking for, and then to go through the papers found to see the language and keywords used there. If I do another search with that keyword, do I find other papers talking about the same thing I'm talking about?