Lately in science, I have been trying to dissolve a couple of salts in some “solvent” – I have now tried some options, but nothing has really worked so far.
So today, after around 3 weeks of trying to dissolve that salt, I sat down to compile the results of all my mixtures of salts-and-solvents – they could definitely not be called “solutions”.
And that was exactly what was wrong with these, not only scientifically and technically, but also on a literary level: What do I call them when I am writing my report to send to my supervisor?
We, scientists, are supposed to be very specific in terms of technical terms. So I could call them “solutions”, because I was ultimately aiming to make a solution but just was not getting there. But then, they weren’t really solutions, so how could I call them that? If I did, what kind of a scientist would that make me? Would I even be able to sleep at night?
It was a relief I could use the word “suspension” appropriately enough for some of them. That was really so considerate of that particular salt-solvent combination to give me the freedom to use another word.
For all other… Mixtures? Salt-solvent systems?… What do I call them? Or do I just craftily go on writing about them, carefully avoiding sentence structures where I would need to use the you-know-what word?
It’s crazy what people expect of a PhD student: they have to be a scientist in the lab, a writer when writing reports and papers and dissertations, and an excellent communicator when they are supposed to present their work (and the best sales person if they choose to go into entrepreneurship).
And being a writer at that particular moment of time, how many times could I allow myself to use the word “mixture” over and over again? Or using the same sentence structure for every next line?
I do not know how I managed all that today. I just hope I can sleep at night.