It may seem counter-intuitive, but I am VERY superstitious about my work. You might suppose that the quantitative powers of science would banish any kind of superstitious voodoo aside, but there are too many things to account for most days. Some of this has an explanation- if you always take a coffee break at one point in an experiment and it works, then skip your break and it doesn't- well, you need an "incubation" time. Much more of it does not. But I swear my experiments fail if I don't follow the routine.
This is fairly normal in science, believe it or not. Dr. Boss will always say to "wear your lucky socks" on the day of an important experiment. I have being wearing metaphorical ruts in the carpet of my experiments for long enough now that I have The Way I Do Things that Must be Done in part because I need consistency, and in part because I am totally superstitious. For example, I thaw all my reagents first (like in a very tiny PBS cooking show), and use down time to label my hundreds of tubes. This, I think, is justifiable. That I insist on doing all of this in the ONLY yellow ice bucket in the lab, which has been My Lucky Ice bucket for years, is less so.
Here is a recent example. In a typically catastrophic way, nothing I did for the two weeks before Thanksgiving worked (I know! I was using the Lucky Ice Bucket!), and I came back with every intention of fixing that this morning.... but, my ice bucket was missing. Which is crazy- I use that ice bucket almost everyday, no one else knows it is lucky. Morosely, I resigned to performing an experiment in an inferior ice bucket, since it was all Doomed to Fail anyhow.
. . . and it worked. Somehow, I managed success outside of my "Lucky" ice bucket.
There are two possible hypotheses here, and I've dedicated many years of my life to the study of the scientific method, so I should know.
1) The color of the ice bucket in which the experiment is performed has no impact on the results of the experiment.
Or, more likely
2) All of the good science luck has been drained out of my yellow ice bucket after years of hard service, and it needs a chance to recover by participating in someone else's experiments for a while.
The vast body of evidence suggests #2, so I'll be switching to a standard black bucket until I hear good things coming out of the yellow one again.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Well, it's good to know that future of civilization and life on the planet is in the hands of people with solid thinking processes like this . . .
Of course, this could be your "penicillin mold" moment with the Nobel hovering over your insightful perception....no pressure or anything.
Post a Comment