Well, if the machinist finished doing the thing he said he was going to do (the machine shop was closed by the time I got back to campus today, so I could not find out), I should be able to start collecting (or more likely for the first day, attempting to collect) data again. This would be the first experiment since March, should it happen.
When my adviser and I agreed in March that I should stop experiments, I believe I told him that it should take about a week to figure out whether my data meant anything. At the end of this week I told myself it would take another week. Then I started to find something. I showed the adviser that something. He said, “Couldn’t this just be X?” I said, “Yes, it could just be X. But how do I know if it’s just X?” He said, “I don’t know.”
So I started digging around. I had heard of method Y, and it sounded like the analytical technique that would answer, once and for all, whether or not it was “just X.” I met with the adviser as he was leaving town, but he needed further convincing that Y was the answer. I backed down, because I didn’t know how to convince him. In part, I didn’t understand Y well enough myself, as I couldn’t seem to find the sort of formal description I sought.
So I went and talked to Dr. Z. I showed Z a related analysis, W. Z said it looked like what I was showing him might in fact be real, but he also didn’t know exactly how to test whether or not it was just X. He pointed me toward method V as a candidate. I went around and found the right books. I implemented V. V gave the same answer as W, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like V still wasn’t telling me whether the apparent effect was “just X.”
It started to seem like I had been running in place for two months. Throughout this process, I had the persistent gut feeling that method Y was in the end the way to go. I believe that it was some shots-in-the-dark on Google Scholar that led me to papers in a related subfield that had used Y, which led me to other papers, which led me to some books that finally explained Y with the sort of formality (and in the end, the formality was all very simple—I ain’t no math genius.) that would be necessary to convince my adviser that Y would, in fact, rule out the possibility of “just X.” I have him the explanation and he bought it.
I went to the Boyhood Home and Europe for my sister’s transcontinental wedding extravaganza. I came back and was unproductive while I waited for my brain to catch up with my body.
I herded my thesis committee into a room, as I am required to do annually. They said, “But isn’t this just X?” I explained why method Y and its results rule out “just X.” They seemed to buy my story, too. I need more data, and I still worry that there will be some way in which everything will all fall apart (and this is a very real possibility), but the conclusion was that the reasonable thing for me to do to was to presume that this is real and move ahead.
I then worked on other stuff while I waited for the machinist to wend his way through a bureaucracy. Today he did half of what I needed him to do, and tomorrow, assuming he did the rest of what I needed him to do, I start trying to move ahead.
So I suppose I should be ecstatic about this. From the way I tell it, it almost sounds like I am on track, finally. And I was definitely pleased, at times. But I remain anxious, in part because my experiments are kind of high-wire acts. I think it’s not completely irrational of me to fear that things will fall apart. It’s happened before.
Hopefully I’ll achieve a modicum of success soon, so I can shift back into chill mode again.
