Hbar/2

It's been a pretty boring week here in the lab.  The upside to this is getting to listen to the awesomeness of "The XX" station on Pandora.  The Xx - "Islands"

Other than the week being boring, it's been relatively unproductive, much to my chagrin. Some cells I had to image ended up looking pretty shitty, if existent at all.  This is frustrating on many levels. For one, these experiments take about 2 weeks each, and (why don't we ever say "for two"?) also because I am actually really curious to know the results of these experiments.  Their results could be potentially exciting and make me -gasp!- want to do more experiments!  Imagine that... interest in my work.

Aside from this being a pretty normal occurrence-- things not really working-- I really have a hard time deciphering when experiments "don't work" (meaning something legitimately goes wrong: conditions were unfavorable, etc) or when I did something wrong.  This uncertainty is maddening because unless it's an obvious mistake or blatant contamination of the cells, it's very difficult to tell if I'm truly just a 'bad' lab scientist or these assays/protocols are imperfect.  While there's an excellent chance the latter is true (as most human-made things are far from perfect), I can't help but feel like I am doing something wrong or not seeing something that I could and should change.  If I can't figure it out, then I can't change it, and I keep repeating the same mistakes. 

How is this cycle productive?  I don't know if it makes me feel better or worse that this is a seemingly normal feeling for most lab-based graduate students.....

See:

and

The not-so-veiled reference to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in the title of this post is because I feel like that principle comes up in life a whole lot. My interest in quantum mechanics sprouts from a great professor of physical chemistry back at UMass, and for a love of the duality of electrons (or anything). Perhaps that's a Gemini thing.

Anyway, without delving into details, the principle says it is impossible to simultaneously determine certain pairs of physical properties to a high degree of acuity. There is a limit to how certain you can be of these two things (momentum and position of a particle/wave, in PChem) at any given time. While this is not really what we're talking about on a macro scale, with life or experiments, I feel it's relatable. I often feel like it's impossible for me to know much with a high degree of certainty.  I'm skeptical and somewhat doubtful of everything, as I'm someone who likes to analyze everything.  There are times when this is a good thing; scientific progress, for instance, requires these traits. And then there are times when it's disastrous-- like when I'm too doubtful of myself.

So, how much doubt is healthy skepticism, leaving room for analysis/improvement..and how much is just flat out hazardous to one's sanity and respectable self-assurance?