I was going to schedule this amazing video for around Halloween, but its shelf life is very limited. With the rise of AI that can make videos of anything you want, pretty soon things like this will lose all impact, drowned out by mountains of generated fiction. This one was taken by our security camera around 2006, so no AI and no computer tricks…
This was in my very first lab at Forsyth Institute. Someone kept leaving our -80C freezers open, which ruins the expensive and delicate materials inside. I kept asking people to be more careful, but it kept happening. So I finally snapped and said that the next person who leaves it open would get in real trouble. Of course it happened again, and I thought, ok that’s it – I’m going to the video and find the culprit. Here is what I saw:
The quality is bad due to the old camera tech, but you can see what’s happening. Anyone who has dealt with those large old -80 freezers before knows what it takes to lift that handle – it’s a considerable amount of force. Of course, first I thought someone was messing with me. I ran in there and spent about an hour and a half looking for wires, tricks, or some way to balance that door handle so that it would just pop open by itself. No way; it has a thick metal thing that wraps around a bolt to lock it very tight, and I found no way to reproduce this event.
I’m not drawing any conclusions or pushing for a specific interpretation; in the spirit of Charles Fort, I leave you with the bare phenomenon and you can make of it what you will. All I can say is that over the years, showing this to everyone from the freezer manufacturer to other scientists, I’ve come across no scenario I would have believed if someone claimed that’s how freezer doors might open by themselves, without showing me a video.
As for my lab folks… Well, of course they were curious about the upshot of all the drama, and demanded to know who’s getting fired. I tried to play it off but it wouldn’t wash, because they had heard me ranting and raving about the freezers and how fed up I was. They demanded to know the outcome of my investigation. I finally had to show them the video, at which point several of them refused to go into that room by themselves in the evenings. I pointed out that we had no data to link whatever was going on to sundown, but this was their prior and I couldn’t shake it.
The thing is, this is just a particularly egregious example of something we bench scientists see every day in smaller form: weird crap that happens with no explanation, and worst of all, no opportunity to ever get to the bottom of it. For example, doing real biology for the first time as a student (my background was computer science), I noticed this pattern: “I did molecular biology procedure X and it didn’t work like you said!” Mentor: “do it again”. Me: “changing what?”. Mentor: “Nothing; do it precisely the same way.” Me: “wtf – I did it again, and now it worked. How do we find out why?”. Mentor: “you don’t; if you stop on every single thing like this, you’ll never succeed. Move on.” Since then, I’ve seen tons of things where the coder in me screams silently “&*^%ing freeze, grab a core dump of the Universe and let’s step through it step by step to see what could possibly have led to this outcome.” But no dice… We all see strange things, all the time, with no video record and no practical way to find out what happened. We assume there must be a reasonable explanation, and we move on. Occasionally someone is dogged about pursuing the discrepancy and strikes gold – a new discovery; most often not. Typically we never find out what’s up. I wonder what percentage of those are really pointers to great things.
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