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Why I Dropped Out
Feb. 7th, 2005 11:26 amI was in a Ph.D program once, in geophysics. I was investigating some deep geological structure beneath the Michigan Basin-- or at least people thought that was what it was.
Something like three years into the program I discovered the truth. This deep structure had been discovered by a COCORP reflection line. (COCORP stood for Consortium for Continental Relection Profiling. It was, or is, an attempt to use a system like sonar to create images of the rock layers and structures on continents, all the way down to the boundary with Earth's mantle. But I always thought it stood for Completely Cornell Research Project, because they ran it and were notoriously loath to let anyone else get ahold of the data, or do anything with it.)
Eventually I discovered the truth, which was that the line across Michigan wasn't processed properly. What happened was... OK, I'm going to get a bit technical here, not much. What they did was send signals deep into the Earth, with a long line of geophones in front of the signal trucks to pick up the reflections when they came back. A geophone is a microphone, basically. Well, part of the line was across an area of onion fields, former lakebottom, muck soils. It was too soft for the signal trucks. So they laid the geophones across, shot the line with the phones in front of the trucks, then ran the trucks around to the front of the line and did the rest of the line with the trucks in front of the phones. The result was that in the center they had twice as much signal to process, twice as many signals to average together. It is likely that with better signal strength there they could pick up structures deeper than anywhere else, but it was also possible it was a multiple reflection or some other data error-- and I had no way to tell which. In any case, it almost certainly was NOT the discrete deep structure in that one area only that all the researchers thought it was-- and still do, for all I know.
Unfortunately you can't write a Ph.D thesis based on the idea that "This exciting structure everyone wonders about doesn't exist." Negative results are as much science as positive ones, but they're not sexy enough to make your name in the research world. I was three years into my project, three years down the drain, and now I had to find another project and start over.
One night, as I was wondering what to do, I dreamed about a former advisor of mine. I had left this person for another under less than cordial conditions, and I still didn't like him. I dreamed I strangled him in his office, cut him up into one-inch cubes (like cheese cubes, but they still had the internal structure of his body visible on their faces) and threw them into the lake. But they kept washing up on the beach. I had to keep running up and down the beach throwing the cubes back out into the water, because if I didn't, people were going to find out what I had done.
That was just too twisted. It scared the heck out of me, thinking what this place was doing to my mind. I announced I was quitting two days later.
I regret those days. Not that I quit, but that I ever went in the first place.
Something like three years into the program I discovered the truth. This deep structure had been discovered by a COCORP reflection line. (COCORP stood for Consortium for Continental Relection Profiling. It was, or is, an attempt to use a system like sonar to create images of the rock layers and structures on continents, all the way down to the boundary with Earth's mantle. But I always thought it stood for Completely Cornell Research Project, because they ran it and were notoriously loath to let anyone else get ahold of the data, or do anything with it.)
Eventually I discovered the truth, which was that the line across Michigan wasn't processed properly. What happened was... OK, I'm going to get a bit technical here, not much. What they did was send signals deep into the Earth, with a long line of geophones in front of the signal trucks to pick up the reflections when they came back. A geophone is a microphone, basically. Well, part of the line was across an area of onion fields, former lakebottom, muck soils. It was too soft for the signal trucks. So they laid the geophones across, shot the line with the phones in front of the trucks, then ran the trucks around to the front of the line and did the rest of the line with the trucks in front of the phones. The result was that in the center they had twice as much signal to process, twice as many signals to average together. It is likely that with better signal strength there they could pick up structures deeper than anywhere else, but it was also possible it was a multiple reflection or some other data error-- and I had no way to tell which. In any case, it almost certainly was NOT the discrete deep structure in that one area only that all the researchers thought it was-- and still do, for all I know.
Unfortunately you can't write a Ph.D thesis based on the idea that "This exciting structure everyone wonders about doesn't exist." Negative results are as much science as positive ones, but they're not sexy enough to make your name in the research world. I was three years into my project, three years down the drain, and now I had to find another project and start over.
One night, as I was wondering what to do, I dreamed about a former advisor of mine. I had left this person for another under less than cordial conditions, and I still didn't like him. I dreamed I strangled him in his office, cut him up into one-inch cubes (like cheese cubes, but they still had the internal structure of his body visible on their faces) and threw them into the lake. But they kept washing up on the beach. I had to keep running up and down the beach throwing the cubes back out into the water, because if I didn't, people were going to find out what I had done.
That was just too twisted. It scared the heck out of me, thinking what this place was doing to my mind. I announced I was quitting two days later.
I regret those days. Not that I quit, but that I ever went in the first place.
