I believe everyone in the Sixty Symbol's audience will appreciate any video about the personal history of one who has been educating us for so long.

Being a technical person who can write and present is a kind of superpower. I once had to write a status update report on my part of a larger engineering project, in this case the real-time image processing pipeline for an enormous neutron radiography system. That was well enough received that I was asked to "buff up" the overall project status report for the customer. That in turn was well enough received that I was asked to contribute to the project documentation, especially the operation and maintenance manuals. Which was well enough received that I was then asked to write the operator training courses (huge story there). Which resulted in my teaching the courses multiple times. Engineers who can write and present, particularly to non-technical audiences, are very rare birds. Not surprising, as most engineering degrees have negligible liberal arts requirements. In my case, at my first job I had to provide information to technical writers, then serve as a technical reviewer/proofreader to support their efforts to make it comprehensible to others. Those writers taught me the importance and power of words, where I had previously been focused exclusively on the power of data and algorithms. I used to think "the numbers speak for themselves". I was so wrong. People must speak for the numbers! After that, I was a regular contributor to the verbiage for bids and proposals, even on projects for which I had no other involvement. That in turn got me introduced to our patent attorneys, where I had great fun helping lawyers and paralegals convert scientists' results into the legalese needed to craft a strong patent. I seriously considered becoming a patent attorney myself! But, no, I stayed an engineer. And while I still do some writing as part of my job, these days my public writing consists primarily of sharing stories in KZfaq comments.

Professor Merrifield is a treasure. Luv just listening to him, me. Hope his students are aware how lucky they are to have him.

Professor Merrifield's reaction to being asked if he read it was precious. Must feel gratifying to be working with someone following in his footsteps.

From the text: "In many ways these galaxies appear ideally suited to the task." Pure Mike Merrifield!!🤣 Unmistakable 33 years later.

This man is one of my heroes, along with most of the sixty symbols cast.

I really appreciate the timing of this video. I just finished up with a project this week and am about to start writing MY very first paper. Really exciting time (nervousness comes along with it too 😅)

A brilliant mind with un-ending enthusiasm, thank you for being here, Professor!

I recall my first scientific article very well. I packed in as much data and analysis as I could. I didn’t want to leave anything out. It felt like this article was going to be the only article I would publish in my life. I learnt to be more concise, direct to the point and minimalistic in the way I constructed and presented papers and presentations. It’s not easy to be concise. Usually a second or several opinions is very handy. 😊

Trivia re: Red cover sheet -- athletic teams at Harvard are "Crimsons"

Always a pleasure to see a new MM video. I don't think it's a coincidence that he enjoys the writing process and that he's such an effective communicator in his videos.

Long ago, some colleagues and I published a paper about nitrous oxide in the stratosphere over Antarctica (or rather its absence, which is involved in the formation of the ozone hole), and we got a reprint request from the Marquette University Dental School. Another request was from Bhutan, and featured a triangular postage stamp depicting the happiest yeti ever.

Yess thank you I very much needed some updates from one of my favorite professors

oooh, please make this a series!

I currently have my first paper in review, and he's right - it's very exciting

Just sent my first paper on arXiv a month ago! Exciting stuff, and Michael expresses the whole experience very well.

Immediately one of my favorite Sixty Symbols videos!

I particularly appreciate the professor's blend of humanity and science. Thank you for sharing this. Another great video.

I don't usually associate digital imaging with the 1980s... that 512x320 CCD used for imaging was probably quite cutting-edge at the time!

as an early career researcher just having graduated from my phd a couple of weeks ago, this insider insight was incredibly helpful, thank you :)

A science communicator from the beginning! I enjoyed this tidbit of personal history, please do more!

I really hope this is going to be a series for all your channels! :)

Professor Merrifield seems such a nice guy. Modest to a fault, polite and patient in his explanations. Nottingham Uni students are lucky.

Super fun to see

Very true that it matters whether papers are written in an engaging way. Some academics write with wonderful clarity and insight that makes their research a pleasure to read, while some write so dryly that I've found myself falling asleep even when reading material that would normally fascinate me. I'm sure there are many papers that have received less attention and fewer citations than they would have if they'd been written more engagingly.

Let me just say: It would be quite useful for me if Brady had uploaded this video one week ago. Today I had to send my first scientific paper that I wrote about cosmic rays, and watching this video would be huge help.

This brings back memories. My first preprints (although they were called "Technical Reports" at the institutions I was associated with) also date from 1989 (my Master thesis of which I got three publications out of (2 journals, 1 conference proceedings)). We used yellow covers -- and when I moved to a different university to work on a ph.D, they had covers with a hole shaped like a rectangle, where you had to align your title/name to. (Someone at the university had created a LaTeX style so it wasn't much of a deal). Of course, there the similarity with professor Merrifield ends. I've only published a handful of papers/preprints, and left academia before finishing my ph.D.

I love all of them but Prof Merrifield is a favorite. Hope one day to meet him.

Something going undiscovered for decades and then shown to be true and important is like when Fritz Zwicky found evidence of galaxies having far more gravity and therefore more mass than was observable, and that was dismissed for decades until Vera Rubin sort of rediscovered that fact when observing the rotational velocities of galaxies at different radii.

This makes me remember that one of the best compliments I've ever got was from a professor who said he rarely got to read a paper as well written as mine, especially for that technical of a subject.

Yeah! Long time I haven’t seen Prof. Merrifield!!!

"By complete coincidence, my PhD student is doing exactly what I did for my first paper." ... Coincidence, right...

I love that they're revisiting the subject with new data. 1989 - that's pre-Hubble telescope, and now we have the JWST. I don't know how relevant it is to the research, but it's a good indicator of how far space exploration has advanced. Literally.

I remember reading a study now some 40 years old that took a scientific research topic in physics and wrote the paper in three styles: Easy to comprehend, somewhat challenging, and very difficult to comprehend. They sent each out to multiple reviewers and found the somewhat challenging version was considered most significant.

That explains why he's such a good communicator. You have to be able to get your data across to others, or it ends up in the bin.

At Last!! Another video hurray!!

This was so wholesome :)

What a great story

I did most of my publishing in the mid-70s to early 80s. I got numerous postcard requests for reprints. Most were from Eastern Europe: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany etc. My wife made up a scrapbook and I still have them!! Stamp collectors might be interested.

For prof Mike, I'm sure the nostalgic is real!

Of course Mike writes as good as he speaks, love that guy

Looking at arXiv is the first thing I do as a PhD student on a daily basis. It is so awesome to see its predecessor.

I'm also around scientists who focus on the science more than the paper, which is fine, but I enjoy the paper writing. Sometimes it's too last minute to really sit down and revise the manuscript, sadly

Any chance we'll get some videos on JWST findings?

Preprints! The pre intarweb version of emailing the authors asking for a pdf (I suppose as early as the mid 90s you could still do that, but you better know how to render a laTeX file.

Nice

I don't feel that inadequate about my 384x288 and 640x480 microbolometers anymore. But I need the optical systems to observe the night sky and also have some control and digital out to do longer integration times.

Scanners have a very hard time reading black ink on red background (especially at the time), and so this is a common anti-photocopying tool.

Love it🙏🙏👌👌

Bit of a direct question - will the Sixty Symbols gang be heading to NAM in a few weeks?

Somewhere out there is a scientist saying "Oh, so you think _you're_ popular with colleagues because you enjoy the process of writing papers? Well, my favorite part is writing _grant proposals._

Every single day that passes and you still don't make videos about the James dean crash It breaks my heart

hmmm pattern... thats an interesting finding

We need to know if the professors results still stand compared to the paper a new student is making

In 20 years, we're going to look back on these videos and wonder. I blame Gen X.

Mendel’s writing on genetics went unappreciated for about 50 years even though already published. Don’t know if because it was poorly written tho.

Avg 3” seeing, that’s tough.

Slightly after stone tablets ?

What's the point of being published if everyone that needs to know the information could get a pre copy? I thought the justification for excessively priced journals was the distribution service

Dr. Merrifield for president in 2024. Yea, I know but one can dream.

And then there was Hubble, then they fixed it.

:)

No wonder he didn't get much interest in the paper - he wrote the title in plain English. I hope he's learned since to write his titles in overly technical language so nobody can fail to realise how clever he is.

My mummy never kept my first paper when I was being potty trained

First