Open-ended meetings

Our astronomer observes many loose ends.

It was almost a month ago, but our astronomer is still following up things from the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society.  Not assimilating comments on his poster; he has barely started on those.  He has spent some time looking up references that other astronomers brought to his attention.  More time has been taken up with digging in his own files to find things he half-remembered, and promised to colleagues.  He has disturbed much dust.

Thinking back on it, he observes other loose ends.  Many of the short talks he attended were sort of interim reports: our project is intended to do this, we have done this much so far.  We have set up our observing program and are partway thorough calibration.  Our first observing run was ruined by clouds, but the second went well (though we didn’t find anything).  Our calculations say that ultraviolet radiaion is important for planets of this kind of star, and we’re now working on other types.  Indeed, in the limited space of a poster paper there’s hardly enough room to set down a few results (as he found), much less a complete research project.

This is not surprising.  A major reason for presenting your work at this kind of meeting is to get comments and suggestions along the way, so you can modify your approach or include something you haven’t thought of.  It’s highly embarassing to find, after you’ve submitted your paper formally, that you’ve omitted something that is actually well-known throughout the community.  A mistake in a poster is no longer visible after you’ve taken it down; a mistake in a published paper is there for all to see, and every scientist’s nightmare.

And of course verbal presentations, even the longer ones deemed important by the organizers, are not adequate to lay out all the details you’d include in the paper.  A meeting is the time to ask questions and get informal hints, not to pore over the actual calibration data or compare many plots of this versus that.

Indeed, our astronomer muses (as he contemplates the book on the philosophy of science that he probably won’t get around to writing), science is like this.  Science is a process, not a set of results.  It continues to happen.  There is discussion, more things to be included, some ideas to discard.

We wouldn’t push that idea very far.  Papers are eventually published, with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.  A book on astronomy from nearly two centuries ago can be still almost completely correct, as our astronomer concluded in his own book, though perhaps a bit incomplete as far as the current subject goes.

But we can still enjoy the process.