Between Galileo and Aristotle there were just a lot of guys with theories they never bothered to test – Helen Monaco’s character in Philip Kerr’s Prayer: A Novel [1]

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things – Leonardo da Vinci [2]

I vividly recall an important team meeting decades ago at Mobil Oil R&D Corp in Paulsboro, NJ during which new data were presented that changed the trajectory of our project as they refuted the theories we held prior to the meeting. Our Division Manager, Dr. Thomas Stein, summarized the situation with a great statement: “One data point is worth one thousand opinions.” I’ve never forgotten that statement and share it frequently with my students.

Let me share three stories that really drive this home.

Story 1 – Galileo

In my book (here), I emphasized the pivotal role of individuals who rolled up their sleeves and gathered the data upon which classical thermodynamics was built. The importance of experimental data in this history cannot be overstated. I gave thanks to such individuals as Tycho Brahe, Joseph Black, Henri Regnault, James Joule, and many others, for rising from comfort, enduring hardship, conducting experiments, and obtaining data. Thermodynamics couldn’t have progressed without them.

But the one scientist to whom I gave the greatest thanks was Galileo.

In my research, I was struck by how some historians downplayed Galileo’s accomplishments, arguing that many before him had explored similar ideas. And that’s true. When we look back—from our current paradigm that Galileo helped to create— we can’t fully appreciate what Galileo did. We repeat his experiments in high school and don’t recognize their importance.

So what did Galileo truly do that made the difference?

He measured!

While everyone from Aristotle to those immediately preceding Galileo thought about all sorts of things, many of the same things that Galileo was to think about, none of them took any measurements. Galileo measured while others thought.

We see this today. Much thinking, proposing, and speculating. But without measurements, without data, it really doesn’t mean anything.

Story 2 – my recollection of a conversation with a former colleague

A former colleague told me a story about a technical problem in one of our facilities. A certain process hadn’t been behaving as expected. Many office discussions involving many hypotheses couldn’t resolve the situation. So my colleague finally decided to do what hadn’t been done. Get a data point. He went out into the facility where the process was situated, shoved a thermocouple through the thick insulation and found the reactor wall temperature to be far removed from where it should have been. That single data point disappeared many hypotheses in an instant.

Story 3 – an experience with MIT’s School of Chemical Engineering Practice at a host company as recalled by the former Station Director, Dr. Monty Alger

There was a project where the host company had a wastewater clarifier. There was supposed to be uniformed distribution of the feed to the clarifier and then it would be ultimately ejected out into the river.

The clarifier wasn’t working and there were a lot of theories about what was wrong. Different groups would attend the students’ project presentations, and the engineers and managers would argue back and forth for an hour or more, all with different theories.

The student group eventually came up with a great idea. They’d do a tracer study with a green dye. They stuck the dye into the clarifier, took a video of it, and showed that video at the final presentation. The entire room saw that the green dye sort of pooled up in the middle. There was massive channeling. There wasn’t any distribution in the clarifier. It was coming in and going straight out into the exit.

The whole room all of a sudden just got quiet because all of the theories, all of the ideas, and all of the things that people thought were going on were totally untrue. One picture showed the whole thing. It was fantastic.

References

[1] Kerr, Philip. 2015. Prayer: A Novel. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. p. 73.

[2] A popular quote attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci.

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