Announcing the first draft of report “Who discovered the isotopes, and why?”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g-e5Z-Nn1z-o-rTCLqCcO568Wn1JFh35/view?usp=sharing
As with everything I do, the first draft will almost certainly be the final version.
As always, I struggled with the ppoblem that science writing is impossible.
For example:
I can never say “A discovered B”. The best I can do is to say that “A is the first author of a paper in which the discovery of B is claimed”.
I can never say “I discovered A”. Firstly because using “I” in a science article is frowned upon. Secondly, the best I can say is that “I am unaware of a valid previous claim of the discovery of A at the time of writing”.
Then there’s the issue of past and present tense. Everything is in the past tense.
I can never say “A is true”. The best I can say is that “I observed A to be true the last time I looked” or “I inferred from observations that A is true”.
Even in the present tense I can never say, pointing at a car, “That car is blue”, because it may have been blue on this side and a different colour on the other side.
To say that “anything is anything” is to guess that it hasn’t changed since the last time it was observed, and it will always have changed since last time it was observed. For instance the colour of a car will depend on its cleanliness, and the lighting.
Then there’s the issue of animate and inanimate.
I can’t say “A said B” because he/she/it didn’t actually say it, they wrote it in a paper. But coversely, I can’t say “the paper said B” because the paper is inanimate and therefore can’t talk. Inanimate objects can’t talk, infer or explain. Last time I looked, there was still debate over whether an inanimate object could “show“or whether I had to say “is shown in” an inanimate object.
To say “is shown in” is third person, which makes for poor reading and is frowned upon.
Then there’s the issue of gender.
I can’t infer that a person is a specific gender, I can only guess, and guessing isn’t acceptable in a science paper. So using pronouns he/she is not only frowned on, it’s inaccurate.
Then there’s the issue of uncertainly.
Everything is uncertain. I can’t claim certainty in a scientific paper, it would be untrue. But then I can’t use words denoting uncertainty in a scientific paper either. I can’t write “may”, “might” because such words are completely meaningless. “May” implies “may not”, “might” implies “might not”, negating everything that follows.
Another word expressing uncertainly, “about” is again not sufficiently precise. Neither is “order of magnitude”.
On the other hand, I can’t validly say “probably” without backing it up with a statistic analysis, preferably using “Student’s t”.
Nor can I say “with 95% probability”, even when backed up by a statistical analysis, because it will never be exactly 95%.
Nor can I say “with 95±1%” because that number “1” is almost certainly going to be inaccurate.
In summary, uncertainly is a problem because certainty doesn’t exist, and statements expressing uncertainty are either meaningless or inaccurate – probably.
Even after dealing with all of those, there’s another problem, nouns.
A noun has to be agreed on. Should I call Confuciusornis a bird, a species, a parave, an avialan, a theropod? All have been used, not necessarily accurately. What I call it will depend on when I name it, because nouns change meaning. ¿Chelonia or Testudines, the answer depends on time. Lounge or sofa or settee? Pink or salmon, aqua or blue? CSIRO Divisions all change their name every two years or so.
What we name things depends on peer group concensus, which not only changes with time but is inaccessible.
That’s far from all. There’s still the hoop jumping to get it published that requires a certain font, line spacing, table style, figure style, word count, number of figures, figure title style, what must and mustn’t have a reference, referencing style.
If you quote from sources, then that’s “plagiarism from multiple sources”, if you don’t then that’s rejected as “insufficiently referenced”, or even sometimes rejected as “original work”.
Then, and only then, do you have to run the gauntlet of peer review. There are four types of peer reviewer. The corrupt (self-interest rules), the incompetent, the lazy and the altruistic conscientious. You’re lucky if you get even one altruistic conscientious reviewer. Very lucky. Whatever method you use for your research, it will certainly be out of date by the time the paper is written, and even conscientious reviewers will get savage about that.
In short, science writing is impossible.