“Tacit Knowledge, Trust and the Q of Sapphire”, 2001 (; similar):
Russian measurements of the quality factor (Q) of sapphire, made 20 years ago, have only just been repeated in the West. Shortfalls in tacit knowledge have been partly responsible for this delay. The idea of ‘tacit knowledge’, first put forward by the physical chemist Michael Polanyi, has been studied and analysed over the last 2 decades.
A new classification of tacit knowledge (broadly construed) is offered here and applied to the case of sapphire. The importance of personal contact between scientists is brought out and the sources of trust described. It is suggested that the reproduction of scientific findings could be aided by a small addition to the information contained in experimental reports. The analysis is done in the context of fieldwork conducted in the USA and observations of experimental work at Glasgow University.
[Keywords: experiment, international trust, measurement of skill, natural science, repetition of experiments, writing conventions]
…The second method of greasing thread demonstrated by Checkhov, and used interchangeably with the first method, was direct greasing of the fine thread with human body grease. Checkhov would run the fine Chinese thread briefly across the bridge of his nose or behind his ear. The ear method was adopted by the Glasgow group, though it turned out that only some people had the right kind of skin. Some, it transpired, had very effective and reliable grease, others’ grease worked only sporadically, and some experimenters’ skins were too dry to work at all. All this was discovered by trial and error, and made for unusual laboratory notebook entries such as: ‘Suspension 3: Fred-greased Russian thread; Suspension 12: switched from George-grease back to Fred-grease’, and so forth. As with James Joule’s famous measurement of the mechanical equivalent of heat”,! it seems that the experimenter’s body could be a crucial variable.
…Knowing how difficult a skill is, is another important part of learning to master it. If one believed that bike-riding could be mastered in one minute, a few minutes of falling off would lead one to distrust claims that bikes could be ridden at all, and one would never learn to ride—still more so with, say, playing a musical instrument. One important thing that the Glasgow group learned from Checkhov was what they called ‘patience’ which, in these terms, is a matter of learning that measuring is difficult and remains difficult (like, for example, golf, rather than bike-riding), even after one has first accomplished it.
Reporting a Second Order Measure of Skill: This kind of science could be made easier if the importance of knowing the difficulty of an experimental skill or procedure was recognized and emphasized. The conventional style of writing scientific journal papers (and even books) excludes details of this kind. Yet someone trying to rediscover how to produce a result in the absence of a laboratory visit could be helped by knowing just how hard the experiment or measurement was to carry out in the first place, and just how hard it continues to be. Such information could be roughly quantified—it is a ‘second order measure of skill’. Experimenters could record something along these lines:
It took us some 17 months to accomplish this result in the first instance, during which time we tried around 165 runs with different set-ups, each run taking around a day to complete. Most successful measurements on new samples are now obtained in around 7 runs, but there is a range of ~1 to 13 runs; each run now takes about 2 hours. The distribution of numbers of runs on the last 10 samples we have measured is shown in the following diagram…
Information of this sort could be expressed briefly, without radically changing the conventional style of scientific paper-writing, and yet could be of substantial benefit to those trying to repeat the work. It is just a matter of admitting that most things that seem easy now were very hard to do first time round, and that some remain hard even for the experienced experimenter. We concede, of course, that within the current conventions of scientific writing, setting out these difficulties would look like weakness; science is conventionally described as though it were effortless, and the accepted scientific demeanor reinforces this impression. What we are suggesting is a slight transformation of convention and demeanor—with a view to improving the transmission of scientific knowledge.