Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Write me this.

My supervisor asked me to start writing my first scientific journal publication. This task has been weighing down on me. My friend said that it should be fairly easy as writing, supposedly, comes easy to me. Scientific writing is different.
If I had to describe my work in literary terms I might say:
" It was the day of culmination! All those hours of fruitless labour, the hour, the moment in fact, of truth had arrived. I put in the sample and it glowed almost with a surreal aura about it. The laser beam was almost a pure Gaussian and the image was the stuff dreams were made of. 15 minutes passed by like an eternity and finally it was time to get the numbers! One by one, like the pieces of a puzzle, it all came together to complete the picture of non-linearity!"
And then maybe I could put some numbers in for those that cared. But of course no self-respecting scientific journal peer review group is going to look at that and say 'wow! she has really brought out the essence of that experiment'! My 'paper' will be duly deposited in the recycle bin.
Hence, I need to be dreary and account painstakingly all the dull details such as beam width and laser frequency. I cannot use flowery language to describe the beauty of the laser light but rather I must speak precisely about its wavelength and rep rate!
Alas! the woes of scientific study. I never cease to pity these scientific types for missing out on the beauty of language - what the Journal of Applied Physics would be were I to write it!

No comments: