But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

[austin_dern]

It was a long and, frankly, pedantic talk. The subject had started out on doing literature searches using online library resources. This soon turned into an extremely long demonstration of how to use Google, and how it compared to specialized subject databases. We got finally to this valuable tip:

``When searching by keyword, it is important that you have the correct keyword.''

Glad we got that straightened out.

I'd always viewed web searches as like being in the Winners Circle on The $20,000 Pyramid, with really loose judges that day. ``Gemini, capsule, Michigan, Kansas, Canada'' -- A Field Guide to American Spacecraft. That's the site.

The other talk, trying to explain the Scientific Method, came from a physicist and went as well as most attempts by physicists to teach The Philosophy of Science go, which I suspect the philosophers in the crowd find amusing. My eyebrows perked up when he claimed that, in Science, evidence is everything and human opinion never enters into the matter, which is true in the same way statements like ``hard science fiction writers faithfully respect scientific fact'' are true.

Trivia: Two years and US$639,000 were spent in the early 1930s trying (unsuccessfully) to cast a quartz mirror for the Palomar Mountain observatory. Source: Life Nature Laboratory: The Universe, David Bergamini.

Currently Reading: Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972-1981, T A Heppenheimer.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

I'm left wondering, of course, whether the athletics folks are given similar lectures: "When running the 200m, it is important that you run faster than everybody else."

I'm reminded of the studies which took place after the ill-considered announcement by Pons & Fleischman, trying to verify whether anything was indeed happening. Quite a few interesting (and some more than a little hazardous) results emerged - but the climate for such experimentation had already been poisoned to the degree that embarking on any such research, whether thought of as "cold fusion" or not, was tantamount to scientific professional suicide.

Ah, I wish I could locate a copy of one episode of Horizon, which went into some such research.. a well-thought out documentary indeed, before the series descended into the mire of popularism. (Not that that's a bad thing per se, far from it - but inevitably, with the focus on being entertaining, the emphasis shifts from the science to the presentation, at the expense of the amount of actual information conveyed)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there were some curious palladium-related anomalies that turned up in the Cold Fusion research, and while -- so far as I know -- none of them seem to hold great prospects inside them, there's some interesting research that should be done. Even knowing that, I was surprised to learn a year or two ago that one of the physics folks at my alma mater was working on what might broadly be called cold fusion -- in his case, using intense sound waves instead of just temperature to generate the pressures that seem to be needed.

For that matter, last I checked nobody had yet explained the original curious column formation that set off the whole polywater spectacle, though everyone's rather confident it wouldn't be polymerization of water that did do it.