illuminating science

As any experimentalist can tell you, keeping a good lab book is essential. When you’re working on an experiment, you must keep records of what you did, what materials you used, what techniques and of course, what results you got. Now, to the unenlightened (or uncynical, depending on how you look at it) this probably seems like just good record keeping and making sure that you don’t lose any hard earned data. And it is, to a large degree.

But surprisingly, one of the most important things you must record is when you did the research. Because, if you discover something amazing and find a way to patent it, you might be required to back up your claim that you discovered it before anyone else. Particularly in high profile and/or highly competitive research areas, the guidelines for doing these lab books is quite intensse - leave no blank pages, sign each page and have it witnessed, paste in photos and put pen marks around the edges bleeding onto the paper to help establish that the photos haven’t been swapped at a later date. And so on.

The idea is that someday, if you’re lucky, that journal might be the evidence you need to establish a multi million dollar patent which will set you up for life. Only a rare few reach this noble level, however - outside one office at the University of California San Diego physics department, a researcher had posted - uncashed! - each royalties cheque he had received from his patent. And each cheque, lovingly blue-tacked to the wall, was for between 1 and 3 cents. Don’t ask me…

But never fear - there’s an alternative! Simply become a famous physicist, leave behind only a few journals each filled with both insightful and personal comments, and they might fetch over one million pounds each. That’s what journals from Robert Hooke went for in a last minute grab by Britain’s Royal Society, just before it went on auction. It was found recently in an attic (man, I wish I had an attic!) and although the Royal Society had claimed they wouldn’t be able to meet the asking price, they managed to produce the dough minutes before the notebook when onto the block.

In case you don’t know, Hooke is a moderately well known physicist particuarly for his discovery that the force a spring pulls with depends linearly on how much it is stretched. Interestingly, he and Newton were often at each other’s throats, and Hooke discovered several things that are now credited to Newton, including: the Newtonian telescope, a certain interference pattern called Newton’s Rings, and the inverse square law of gravitation (which he predicted, but could not prove. Darn!)

The book will soon go on display, and scans of the pages made available online. Although I doubt I’ll ever look at them, it is nice to have history in the public domain, rather than some collector’s private library.

Oh, and there’s one small caveat I should mention if you plan to use this to make your fortune - it only tends to work posthumously. Perhaps now would be a good time to get an uncle or aunt hooked on physics?