I am writing a research presentation for Wednesday; I am talking at the Department of Physics at the University of Bath. I will be presenting results on crystallisation in grooves obtained by Amanda Page, a PhD student of mine. You can read a short news item on this work in ScienceNOW here. As I was writing the conclusion of the talk, I was reflecting on how the research has evolved as we found more about how the crystals formed in the grooves.

At the start of the project, around 4 years ago, I wrote a small application to get money to send Amanda to Amsterdam to work in a group there, and to learn some things she would need. In the application I wrote confidently about what I expected to find. It was a nice simple and clear idea: If the groove had just the right angle at its tip then the crystal would fit perfectly in the groove like a hand in a glove. If the angle was not quite right then this would squash and stretch the crystal, slowing crystallisation.

We have now done the research, and I was right about the first half but simply wrong about the second. In grooves of the wrong shape the crystals are not squashed and stretched, they avoid this by a combination of rotating in the groove and by forming what are called ‘stacking faults’. Stacking faults are where the orderly stacking of the sheets of molecules is disrupted. These faults can form very easily in the type of crystal Amanda and I were studying.

Being proved wrong is half the fun of research. After all if we knew all the answers before we did the research, it would not be research. Personally, I often like being proved wrong more than I like being proved right. Being right is boring. But if you are proved wrong you can work out why you were wrong and then entertain your fellow scientists by telling them why the simple, obvious answer is wrong. As an academic scientist I am not in this for the money, and certainly PhD students don’t do PhDs for the money. We do it because it is interesting and fun, but only if you are wrong at least some of the time.