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Yesterday, I had promised myself I would work on my guided research a lot: I would finish an entire chapter! So, I was motivated and ready at 9.00 am. I wanted to start with adding some equations in my report and used a paper my supervisor wrote. However, before just copying and pasting everything, I decided to do the derivation of the equations myself, because I wanted to know if I was (still?) capable of doing that. I needed to derive a certain form of the Stokes equations in which the viscosity was dependent on position. At 9.30 am I was very frustrated and thought that I never ever should have gone to university, because I couldn't even derive such a simple equation as that! I was always left with 1 extra term that just couldn't become 0 in my opinion. I asked a friend, M. (with whom I share an 'office': it's the student room at the university basically), to help, but he also couldn't tell me how to get rid of that 1 extra term. He gave me some leads to work on but at 10.00 am, I had decided the leads were hopeless (as was I) and went to my supervisor, feeling very stupid indeed. However, my supervisor, after some discussion and deriving the equation together also found that he had 1 extra term. He sent me back to my 'office' with a textbook on the subject and the advice to check other papers: did they have the same equation or did they have an extra term as well? It was already 10.30 am by then.
After scanning through a lot of papers and even finding a complete paper concerning deriving the Stokes equations for a position dependent viscosity (which did not look like the equation I was trying to derive at all), I was running out of options. I let my supervisor check it again (11.00 am) and then another friend with whom I share the 'office', J. (11.30 am). Everyone had the same conclusion: I wasn't stupid (*yay*), I had just found an error in the paper! And not just in this paper, because this particular set of equations has long been copy-pasted throughout several papers (by the same author: my supervisor). So, in the end about 5 papers were found with this mistake in the equation! Secretly (?), I am very proud I found this mistake by looking critically at the paper and insisting on deriving the equations myself, because all the papers had already been published and had been through review. No one found this, but I did!
(Needless to say, by the time I had resigned to the inevitability that the error was in the paper, the morning was pretty much gone already. And then there was an extended lunch... So, I did not finish that chapter. Nor did I ever really start writing.. Maybe today will prove better!)
After scanning through a lot of papers and even finding a complete paper concerning deriving the Stokes equations for a position dependent viscosity (which did not look like the equation I was trying to derive at all), I was running out of options. I let my supervisor check it again (11.00 am) and then another friend with whom I share the 'office', J. (11.30 am). Everyone had the same conclusion: I wasn't stupid (*yay*), I had just found an error in the paper! And not just in this paper, because this particular set of equations has long been copy-pasted throughout several papers (by the same author: my supervisor). So, in the end about 5 papers were found with this mistake in the equation! Secretly (?), I am very proud I found this mistake by looking critically at the paper and insisting on deriving the equations myself, because all the papers had already been published and had been through review. No one found this, but I did!
(Needless to say, by the time I had resigned to the inevitability that the error was in the paper, the morning was pretty much gone already. And then there was an extended lunch... So, I did not finish that chapter. Nor did I ever really start writing.. Maybe today will prove better!)
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