A plea for documentation

We pull out something from the archives.

In the past week or two a couple of our consultants have sought, and eventually found, records of projects from years ago.  Going through the reports and files, they had some similar reactions.

Our navigator dabbled in Chemistry as an undergraduate, eventually completing a research project.  It’s possible he hadn’t reread his final report after graduation, before exhuming it this week.  Considering how little experience he had in technical writing at the time, he’s not too displeased at the result; it’s reasonably clear and understandable.  He can criticize its organization and, especially, it lacks a good motivation for his work; he hopes he’s learned something along those lines since.  He is more impressed by the grasp of organic synthetic theory that he once had, and has since forgotten.  He is most impressed by the procedures of lab work set down in detail, the manipulation of glassware and the processes of heating, cooling and distillation.  He certainly could not do anything of the sort today.

However, his grasp of physical Chemistry, the calculation of things, at the time seems most primitive.  Thinking back on it, he admits he had been introduced to the concepts and methods that would have allowed a much better attack on the theory of the problem.  However, he simply didn’t have the confidence or the mastery of the tools he’d been given.  It was similar to the orbit-calculations that our tutor has described, or the liquids-in-space work our astronomer has done since.

Our astronomer pulled out a file on a years-ago project inspired by eclipses of the Moon.  There were pages mostly of calculations with a few drawings, done in support of an observing campaign that he never carried out.  They were neatly written and carefully organized, but it’s been a long time since he did them and he’s no longer sure what most of them were trying to accomplish.  In a few places there are very precious annotations, precise definitions of what the variables are and what was being calculated.  In addition, there were notes like, “This isn’t very useful,” or “This is obviously nonsense; I’ve made an error somewhere,” as well as, “So this works out the way it should.”  There are also a few valuable references to sources.  He also was impressed by some of the abilities of his former self, this time in mathematics and Physics.

Neither of our consultants is currently planning to pick up the old project and carry it forward.  It seems unlikely our navigator will set up, or get access to, a properly-equipped chemical laboratory; though it’s possible he could have a go at calculating electric fields in liquids.  Our astronomer is more likely to do something about lunar eclipses, though he may just start over from one of the beginning points of the calculation.  It could be quicker than actually following what he did years ago; and in any case would provide a check on earlier results.

You may be more organized than our consultants, or less likely to drop projects for long periods of time, or less inclined to have multiple projects at all.  But both of them (along with our tutor, teaching computer programming) agree that you cannot write down too many details about what you’re doing, or why.