Writing my Bachelors Thesis has opened my eyes to what seems to be a horrible paradox. I am turning my thesis in this Friday, and have been proof reading for weeks now. Every time I print my thesis, read it through with critical eyes or have someone else do it for me, I will find a number of mistakes. After fixing these mistakes, explaining things in more details and carefully rethinking the proof I print the thesis to redo the process. But the next time, about the same number of mistakes will be present.
This process does not seem to converge, and after weeks, I still find small and large mistakes in the proofs. The reason seems to be, that when I find a mistake, I try to explain more carefully what happens, introducing more details in the proof. And with these new details, I make room for more mistakes. A mistake is not necessarily something which makes the proof wrong, it is just a slightly wrong argument for a correct statement, but nevertheless, they have to go.
Maybe this is a general problem, since opening up for more details also opens up for more things to be explained, and to explain those to an extent, will open up for even more details.
Do you experience this when writing proofs?