Science Wiki

Welcome to the Wiki
I am hoping to make a community site for the practical know-how of doing science. Only using Fandom for this first order prototype to get some thoughts down, figured it would make a decent minimum viable product. If this seems promising, we can work on making something more professional; I wanted to get down a bit of content first.

Do people outside materials science get what I am trying to do? I can eventually cover a decent chunk of materials chemistry and some polymer stuff, but will need help expanding beyond that.

I've currently written 35 pages organized into three categories, but open to changing the format.
 * Synthetic Techniques
 * Characterization Techniques
 * Tools

Style guide: Pages should be limited to: What is this for, how do you do it. Example:

"FTIR is used to analyze the chemical bonds present in a sample. This is done by grinding a powder sample with a small amount of KBr, and pressing the mixture into a thin transparent pellet. The pellet is then carefully placed into the sample holder. (Picture)"

Describe your topic
This was inspired by a couple things. Firstly, I recently stumbled across the American Society for Metallurgists handbooks. They are this incredibly clear guide for doing anything metallurgical; how to melt together two metals, how to section and image the metals such that you can see the constituent phases clearly, how to characterize them with each technique. Finding it made everything so much simpler; all fields should have something like this.

Secondly, I have been playing around with some synthesis of complex oxide materials, and have made so many really dumb mistakes. For example, I didn't make sure the filter paper was fully dry after vacuum filtration and got paper fibers in my product, or I didn't fully dehydrate my salt in the TGA to measure the water content. Experimental procedures in publications are not adequate; almost everything I know I just learned from random people in my group. Most of this stuff is common-sense, but we should write this stuff down publicly instead of spreading it privately within research groups. Make it accessible,

Finally; Game of Thrones has a community wiki for the dissemination of knowledge. Scientific research is almost as important as GoT, seems like we should have one too.

I am really spending this first shot just trying to get as much information down as possible. I am not in expert in most of these fields, I am hoping that is where the community comes in. Correct any mistakes, but try to stick to the very practical; here is what this is, here is what the physical act of doing this is like. I am open to any feedback @briantheligman on twitter or at briantheligman@gmail.com.

-Brian Heligman

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