I remember an old PhD comics strip where a professor says “Remember kids, the only difference between fooling around and science is writing it down.”. In the context the goal was obviously for it to be funny but it is actually a very good and wise advice.
Wow, that's actually deeper than it sounds. I do wonder though: did a lot of famous scientists (like Einstein, Feynman, Turing, etc) use writing as a vehicle for learning?
See "inventor's notebook": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook - some good examples of famous notebook habits are linked to from there (Einstein and Tesla and Edison and da Vinci are all mentioned).
I wish I was better at thinking in handwritten notes. I've been using computers my whole life, so typing feels very natural to me, while handwriting feels slow and cumbersome. I've become pretty proficient at thinking in code and moving things around in text editors, but whenever I try to do something on paper with equations it feels like there is a mental block there. This has prevented me from learning as much math and physics as I would like to have learned.
Though he wasn't an eminent scientist, I worked with someone who had gone through engineering school back in the 1950s. He kept volumes of meticulous notebooks and saved a great deal of time because he never had to waste hours on "I know I figured this out in October 2022 but I can't remember how".
A real inventor's notebook today has a space to sign and date each page, and you should X out any space you don't use. That helps it have legal force.
Presumably this is about intellectual property claims.
If you get into legal issues around patents, being able to prove when you made notes on something could be important.
Signing and dating each page helps demonstrate that you've been taking notes at specific times.
Crossing out the areas of the page that you don't use helps in case you get accused of deliberately leaving blank space in your notebook so you can backfill it later on a page that you already signed and dated.
Of course, this is predicated on the idea that you use pen and paper for notes! All of my notes have been digital for over a decade at this point.
I saw one in a stationary catalog some years ago. It was exactly as you describe it.
There was space for a notary seal as well. I think the idea was to have it notarized once every so often so that the notary was affirming the date on the page, and that location of the X-ed out areas.
I still have the bound, page-numbered notebook issued to me by Microsoft in the late 90s for this exact purpose, along with a lecture explaining the methodology above. (A rather misguided effort by an IP attorney who was apparently new to software…)
Einstein was really good at thought experiments... and if I remember correctly, he said once that he sometimes had "trouble" to express thoughts in words.
It's still science even with a low p value! It's just a negative result instead of a positive one. Such results really ought to be published, even if they aren't usually.
Not only. Just like when actually coding to implement a given specification you find yourself refining the specification and discovering edge cases that weren't taken into account etc., when you actually start writing for other you need to make everything clear and to actually develop your thoughts, and it also "debugs the science", if I may. See also the concept of rubber duck debugging which is another instance of the same kind of effect.
