Lab Coats (Not) Optional

(THIS IS JUST A TEST Y’ALL.  I TYPED UP A FLUFF BLOG REAL FAST, JUST SO I CAN TEST THE EMAIL READ MORE FEATURE.  PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF IT WORKS.  THANKS! )

My favorite scientists all wear white lab coats—but only when it’s cold in the lab.  Otherwise, they wear grungy old tees and ripped jeans.  They know one thing most regular folks don’t.

If you wear nice clothes to the lab, you end up getting burn marks, scorch holes, ripped sleeves, and mysterious stains that will never come out no matter how many times you wash them.

This is especially true in wet labs (chemistry and biology) and also true in mechanical research labs and machine shops where soldering irons and welding equipment are frequently used.  These sciences require the validation of data via mechanical means.

For chemistry, this means if the shit you’re mixing together doesn’t give the result you’re looking for, you only have two choices–concede that maybe your hypothesis is a dead end, or you try again and hope that it was just a fluke error which messed up your experiment.

For robotics, it might be rewriting codes for the software parts, or rewiring nodes for the hardware parts.  Either way, you keep at it till you’ve satisfied your curiosity that your premise is valid–or not.

What you CANNOT do is create the experiment on the computer, throw in lots of variables, run simulations, and then publish the results of the simulation as a valid fact, because quite simply, it’s NOT a fact.  It’s just a computer model and you have to state it as such.

You can use as many models as you wish to shore up your hypothesis, but it is still just a bunch of computer models.  To get real data, you have to use real test subjects and perform real scientific experiments on them.

That’s why we have VERY EXPENSIVE particle accelerators that are the size of small cities–because computer simulations of particle accelerators can’t produce real results.  All they can do is give us an approximation of what might happen, along with a very cool anime guy to explain it all in visually stunning colors, sights, and sounds.

We can shoot computer-generated binary-coded particles at each other all day long, but at the end of the day, the digital particles aren’t real.  They are just models of what are endless possibilities that may occur in real life.

And this is what I mean when I say we get seriously conflicting messages from those who are suppose to be experts in their fields.  I am not a scientist, but I do know a handful of them personally and up close.  The approach that they take to science is not trivial.  They wear some seriously scorched and ripped lab coats to find their answers.

And then I jump on their research and give them, at best, a one-line credit for all the work they’ve done, with not even a picture of their face to document their laborious efforts.  This just doesn’t seem quite fair, but oh well.

This is my prerogative because they are scientists and I’m the Taobabe.