KEEPING
A USEFUL LABORATORY NOTEBOOK*
The purpose of a Laboratory Notebook is to provide a detailed record of your experiments: what were your plans and why, how you carried
out the experiment, and what results were obtained. This record should be made in ink and be readable at some later
time by you or anyone else. Both you and
your partner should keep separate notebooks.
Each day's entry should begin with a date and time, a statement of what you plan to do and why. Subsequent entries should include (for
example) how you wired a cable; what purpose it served; problems you found and
your solutions to them: e.g. "My connector was clearly not designed to be
soldered to a wire." Be sure to
include lots of carefully drawn diagrams
and write down all important parameters
as for example: which lens was used, in which orientation it was mounted etc.
The more information you collect the easier it will be to remember what you
have done.
Use tables for the collection of data
in measurement series and for the comparism of data from different sources.
At the end of each day's
entries, make a summary of your
accomplishments and unresolved problems as well as your current plans for next
time.
HELPFUL HINTS:
1. Do not erase anything! Just cross out the data you perceive to be
incorrect. Later you may discover that
your "incorrect" data was correct after all.
2. During automated computer
taking of data, it is a good idea to keep a separate time record of important
events in your notebook -- what time you started taking data, opened a valve,
changed heater power, broke a wire, etc.
Always write down in the notebook
the name of data file that the computer is generating.
3. When entering data in your
notebook, be sure to record the RAW DATA, not the result of some computation. For example, suppose you determine the
distance between a lens and a screen by measuring their two positions on a
single meter stick. Record in the
notebook the position of each object and then do the subtraction to obtain the
distance between the lens and screen. If
you just record this difference and make a mistake, you cannot go back and
correct it later.
4. Leave lots of space in your
notebook for pasting in your computer-generated graphs.