Smoke and Lettuce

A little story from grad school: What else was I missing?

Author’s note: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about all the things we cannot see, at least on the surface, or from where we are right now. A book I’m currently reading noted the following: “Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can’t use he often can’t see.” (The Adventures of Augie March, pg 437). And some of my recent posts have attempted to look into this theme. My work in astronomy too focuses on the difficult to see - strange galaxies with light so spread out they sink into the darkness of the night. So this week I’m sharing a little story about trying to publish a paper about these galaxies, and a few of the sinking things I couldn’t see.

I didn’t know what I was missing. Missing on the screen in front of me, where everything seemed fine, missing at home, 533 miles away, where I thought things were fine, and missing continents – or was it worlds? – away (what even is fine?). 

Ithaca, New York, 2017, sometime during those early months when winter won’t leave. It was my 6th year of graduate school, and I was desperately trying to graduate, find a job, construct a future — one where Mom and Katelyn and Martha would be proud of me, where those ghosts of Christmas Past would be happy, and where people respected the few things I had left to say. My own internal winter that wouldn’t leave, I suppose.

But that whyisitstillcold day my spin parameter graph looked good! I mean there were a lot of assumptions built in, but this was a result. The yellow bars representing my special sample of galaxies standing like sentinels far apart from the dark blue smooth lines of my comparison sample. I knew they must be spinning differently. And now here it was. Success! I’d lost so much sleep over this paper. But now this final substantive chapter of my thesis was coming together. 

It wasn’t until two months later, when I’d finally submitted the dang thing I got that email that almost made it fall apart. 

“Hi Luke, Thanks for the data! But I am having trouble reproducing your spin values.” Well that’s not good. This was already awkward enough that I’d forgotten to include Kristine as a co-author. And that knot in my stomach as I desperately searched through my code until I found it — that little r_a, where it should have been r_h, grabbing all the wrong values — what a mess. What else was I missing? 

Some corrected code…

It cascades a bit: the comparison fit should have been the lambda parameter from section 5.1 of Huang et al. 2012, not section 5.2. Regrettable error. And the selection was supposed to eliminate all the code 2 (potentially bad) sources. My bad.

In the end we eventually got something reasonable published, at the cost of sleep, hygiene, and some very injured pride. “I like my lettuce fresh, not my results,” an old academic told me once. Implying of course that hot off the press usually meant wrong, that haste always accompanied mistakes, like fire accompanies smoke. (Can you still hear your dad like I can hear mine, as we struggled to get that wet wood to burn? “Well, where there’s smoke there’s fire!”) The corrected calculation did show my galaxies had distinct spins, albeit in a different way than we initially thought. And subsequent analysis has verified that indeed, the motions of these galaxies are strange, their dark matter unexpected and weird. But at the time I didn’t know. Blindsided by the world I couldn’t see.

Author’s note #2: One other thing you perhaps can’t see in this post: some weeks are better than others when it comes to writing. This week I’ve felt some invisible weight sitting on my creative energies, squishing my thoughts in too many directions at once, an incoherent melon splat I’d rather walk away from than attempt to clean up. This wasn’t what I was intending to post. But it was the biggest chunk I could find. Still, it’s something - hopefully enough to chew on for now, and we’ll find more nourishment next time!