I believe it was
Thomas Henry Huxley who said:
The great tragedy of Science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by
an ugly fact
often restated as:
Another beautiful theory done in by a brutal gang of facts.
This is exactly the problem I'm facing with my thesis. I have these grand theories and hypotheses but am finding hard facts with which to test them very hard to produce...
This is particularly hard since my supervisors appear to be travelling in tag-team---never all in the country long enough to all get together for a meeting.
Still, I've hurriedly coding my latest ideas so I have something to present before the next department (next friday). This explains the descreaced noding of late.