Читать книгу Planning and Executing Credible Experiments - Robert J. Moffat - Страница 15

People have always been impressed by data, as though it could never be wrong. As a young experimentalist, the saying that leads this chapter impressed me greatly. At first, I thought it was a clever play on words. Then I began to take it more seriously. It is true. People do seem to put more credence to experimental results than in analysis. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard someone say, with a tone of absolute finality, “Well, you can't argue with the data!” Fact is, you can and should.

This places a heavy responsibility on the experimenter. One may respond to such responsibility by taking great pains to establish the credibility of the data before actually taking data “for the record.” Another response is to simply crash ahead and take data on a plausible but not proven experiment, because you can't think of anything you have done wrong. After all, these latter folks seem to think, “If I don't like the data, I will do it again, differently.”

That latter view undermines credibility. If you feel free to ignore data because you don't like it or don't understand it, then you haven't run an experiment, you have just been playing around in the lab.

Many of the suggestions offered in this work are related to establishing credibility before the production data are taken: calibration of instruments, running baseline tests, etc. In this respect, an experiment is like an iceberg – 90% of the effort is “unseen,” whereas only about 10% of the effort is invested in taking the production data.

Practically all of the experimentalists we know find the saying as a unique privilege and honor and as exhortation to produce the very best science. It gives us pause that people may base their design choices, their engineering, or even their lifestyle choices on their trust of our reported results and conclusions. This is a weighty responsibility worthy of doing our very best.