Error lies at the heart of science; but there are a number of different kinds of “wrong”. An error in hindsight, where a past hypothesis of yours – perfectly reasonable at the time – is disproven by more accurate or complete measurements, or the discovery of unappreciated complexities in the system you’re studying, is just part of the scientific process, even if many scientists have trouble acknowledging such errors. An interpretive error – making questionable inferences from your experimental data, or wrongly using extant knowledge from other sources – is more serious, but is something that peer reviewers are usually only too happy to point out to you (there is, of course, a fine and fairly hazy line between a truly erroneous conclusion and a disagreement over how particular data should be interpreted). By far the worst breed of wrong, however, is the data error, where some sort of experimental or analytical error invalidates your results, and undermines any conclusions you draw from them. Discovering such an error means that corrections have to be issued, or in the worst cases, entire papers have to be withdrawn. It’s Not A Good Thing.
So you can imagine my horror last Friday, when I was confronted with the serious possibility that a correction error had invalidated all of the palaeomagnetic data I collected for my PhD, and hence the work which represented the bulk of my current publication record.
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For lot's more videos on soil moisture topics, see Drs Selker and Or's text-book support videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoMb5YOZuaGtn8pZyQMSLuQ/playlists
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Nice plan for content warnings on Mastodon and the Fediverse. Now you need a Mastodon/Fediverse button on this blog.