You spent months on your calculation, but finally it’s paid off. Now you just have to write the paper. That’s the easy part, right?

Not quite. Even if writing itself is easy for you, writing a paper is never just writing. To write a paper, you have to make your results as clear as possible, to fit them into one cohesive story. And often, doing that requires new calculations.

It’s something that first really struck me when talking to mathematicians, who may be the most extreme case. For them, a paper needs to be a complete, rigorous proof. Even when they have a result solidly plotted out in their head, when they’re sure they can prove something and they know what the proof needs to “look like”, actually getting the details right takes quite a lot of work.

Physicists don’t have quite the same standards of rigor, but we have a similar paper-writing experience. Often, trying to make our work clear raises novel questions. As we write, we try to put ourselves in the mind of a potential reader. Sometimes our imaginary reader is content and quiet. Other times, though, they object:

“Does this really work for all cases? What about this one? Did you make sure you can’t do this, or are you just assuming? Where does that pattern come from?”

Addressing those objections requires more work, more calculations. Sometimes, it becomes clear we don’t really understand our results at all! The paper takes a new direction, flows with new work to a new, truer message, one we wouldn’t have discovered if we didn’t sit down and try to write it out.