No improvement yet?

Sometimes you make no progress until everything’s done.

One of our tutors was part of an undergraduate research program.  His work was in physical chemistry, and as is the way of things, he learned more about giving talks than about chemistry.  Another student in the group intended to study some feature of physics that required a high vacuum.  We don’t remember how far he got in his research, but he did learn a great deal about finding and fixing leaks.  It is a particularly frustrating process, because of course you can’t raise a good vacuum until you’ve found all the leaks.  You can be making excellent progress and still show no apparent improvement.

Our astronomer passes on a story from a colleague he worked with at an observatory in Chile.  About the time that the telescopes switched over from using photographic plates to digital electronic detectors (a few years before digital cameras appeared commercially), it became obvious that the “seeing” in one of the domes was bad.  That means there were air currents, due to local warm spots, messing up the images.  It’s like the shimmer in the air above the road on a hot day, though much less obvious unless you’re looking at high magnification through a telescope.  Again it was a long process of tracking down and eliminating problems, and seeing little improvement until almost every one was gone.

(We contrast this with the many scientific papers that report not detecting something, a particle or signal or feature of the universe that someone had reason to believe existed.  These almost always set an “upper limit,” showing that the particle (if it exists) must have a lower mass than this, or the radiation must be weaker than so many watts per square meter.  While frustrating to the theorist who wants to see the theory proven, there is still clear progress as the limits are made tighter.  There isn’t the same temptation to give up in frustration, to conclude that one’s task is impossible.)

We wonder how many experiments, processes or inventions have been abandoned as unworkable when most of the difficulties had already been overcome.  Sometimes they become known when someone with more patience (or funding) or a different approach succeeds, or when technology makes the aim easier.  Some may never be known.

There is a very immediate and practical example of this phenomenon, where little improvement is seen until almost everything is in place.  A very contagious disease will spread from person to person throughout a population unless and until almost every chain of infection is cut.  If most people in (infected) town A stay there, and most people in (clean) town B stay there, the disease will still spread through anyone traveling between them.  That is why having everyone observe the precautions against transmission is so important, and why it’s sometimes hard to see improvement in spite of great effort.

In order to succeed, you have to hang on until the last little bit gets done.