Back to the old drawing board

2003-02-21 - 2:06 p.m.

I don't recall if I mentioned this or not, but the funding for my filtration project was cut. So that's about a year of work towards my Ph.D. that has now been derailed. I don't even think I can use it for anything anymore, because I didn't do any real development. At this point, it's all numbers. Lots and lots and lots and lots of numbers, hours and hours and hours worth of data gathered... Sigh....

So anyway, I've since started looking into a few new things - some of which I knew I would eventually get started on, others of which are totally new ideas. I gotta tell you, the learning curve is pretty tough. What's worse, the stuff I'll be doing isn't obviously real world applicable at this stage (although, we have envisioned many potential uses), so it's hard to talk about with non-techies. Hell, it's hard to talk about with techies, because a bunch of them know more about this than I do! And the ones that don't, well, they tend to ask questions that I don't know the answers to :-/

So now I'm reading. And reading, and reading and reading. Hopefully, within the next 2 weeks, I'll be in the lab. Or, at the very least, designing experiments and getting trained on the appropriate equipment.

The big problem is that we're doing something that somebody else already did, except that we don't trust this guy's results. So now I'm reading his research so I can try to find some flaws in what he has done and try to do things correctly. I don't know, as a doctoral pre-candidate, I feel a bit too humble to poo poo some established thermodynamicist's work and think I have a better way to do it. But I suppose that it's the asking of questions, gathering of answers, and questioning said answers that makes research what it is.