A PhD candidate is buried in science for years on end. Their final dissertation, or thesis, is presented in a precise format, full of math and facts that have been checked over and over. But there's one place that a scientist can write prose from the heart, and that is the acknowledgement section of the dissertation. Tabitha Carvan dove into the archives of the Australian National University College of Science and found that PhD acknowledgements contain a certain kind of poetry.
The rest of the thesis contains careful, reasoned findings and figures, but on this one page, the author-scientist can release all the pent-up emotion they couldn’t express elsewhere.
They’re like an explosion in a lab.
Carvan discovered that acknowledgements written before 1980 or so were very businesslike, but more recent ones drew a picture of the scientist who wrote these things in their head over and over for years. She gathered quite a few segments of poetic and representative samples for us, from the simple to the heartfelt to the funny to those that combined all of the above. Just a line or two tells us about the real person behind all that science in the rest of the paper. You won't be able to read them all without getting a little verklempt. -via Metafilter