Harold R. Hay: Solar Pioneer
(Page 3 of 17)
September/October 1976
By Mother Earth News Editors
PLOWBOY: Yes, but there's research and there's research. There's the "white coat in the lab" type and there's the "get your hands dirty in the field" kind. Which variety have you specialized in?
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HAY: I've been lucky. I've gotten to do it all. On that first project, for instance, I was responsible for everything. I prepared the logs, went through the sawmill with them, took the samples, conditioned the wood, made all the physical tests and the microscopic examinations, and analyzed the changes that took place in the wood we treated.
This was extremely valuable training, you see, because gave me a very interdisciplinary approach to looking at problems. As did my library research the year before, when I had studied the original work done by both scientific and technical people and other experimenters who hadn't been so scientifically and technically trained.
As a result, I've never been particularly disturbed about going into some "expert's" carefully guarded little area of expertise and doing something. Also, as a result, I became comfortable doing things with my own two hands. I wasn t relying on an assistant—who might or might not know what he was doing—to handle my dirty work. I was doing it my self. I was developing both the theory and the shop experience on my own as I went along. When an experiment fell on its face, I knew I was the only one to blame . . . and when something went right, I knew exactly why it turned out OK because I had done it.
I think this personal involvement—this "hands on" approach to research—is a very important part of finding the solution to a problem. It's a shame that so many of today's "big names" in so many fields relegate this so-called "dirty work" to assistants. Perhaps that's why a great many of the current "experts" in almost any given field can so blandly make the most outrageous and conflicting statements about their areas of study.
You read the papers written by these fellows and you realize they're contradicting each other and you say, "Gosh, they both can't be right." And then you analyze the situation from first one and then the other's point of view, and you sometimes wind up finding them both wrong. They've each gotten an idea and then spent so much time justifying their respective positions, that they're both completely blind to a third—and the actual—answer to their problem. They're out of touch with the real world. They need to theorize less and just roll up their sleeves and actually try some of those grand ideas they're kicking back and forth. You can argue all day about theories ... but, once you put them to the test, they either work or they don't. And there's no arguing about that.
PLOWBOY: What about your wood preservation ideas? Did they work?
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