At The Lab

This week's quirky term which I encountered in the context of physics is "determinantal equation."

Why it's interesting:
It sounds like "detrimental"! (As in, solving too many determinantal equations is detrimental to your mental health.)

What it is:
The equation one uses to find eigenvalues/eigenvectors.

Where I encountered it:
Classical mechanics class

We are a university lab and so we rarely do work specifically for any government entity. There is the odd experiment for NASA where they want to know the effect individual medium-energy heavy ions can have on things, and we are very well setup to do those. But to address a common misconception, we don't work on bombs or anything related to bombs. We may be said to work on things that are related to things that are related to nuclear weapons, but we are in nuclear physics after all, and as we all know you are probably only five degrees away from Kevin Bacon.

Greetings!

We begin with the first of a no doubt large number of rants about physics education. This time, it's entitled "Don't Test What You Don't Teach." This is a good maxim in general, although instructors may justifiably expect advanced students, at least, to be able to extend some taught concepts on their own by learning independently. For introductory classes especially, however, particularly those geared towards students who don't really care at all about physics, instructors will probably not find many students taking the initiative to learn or synthesize physics beyond what is needed to do the homework and do well on the exams.

So every scientist, no matter what field of science you are in, knows jokes that you and your colleagues get and everyone else on the planet looks at you like you should be committed to an asylum. My personal favorites are the ones that rip on chemists, engineers and mathematicians, but then again I'm a physicist and tend to be an elitist (read elitist as ... well I guess I shouldn't type that but you get the idea) due to that fact. But every group has their own little quirks and the NSCL is no different.

I'm sure you have had an experience that is exemplified by this quotation:

“Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.”
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
-- also, Oliver Wendell Jones in the "Bloom County" comic strip

Ideas can be so wonderful and delicate, like a colorful butterfly wafting in the breeze... until smashed against the windshield of an 18-wheeler called "reality."

Friday, Dan and I came in for the day shift and one of our first duties was to ask the operator to tune up the beam. They had some problems and a breakdown or two and we didn't see the beam for the rest of our shift.
Saturday we came in and again asked for a tune at the beginning of our shift. This time there were multiple breakdowns and we weren't up and running again for two shifts.

Reading a 1996 Scientific American article about Titanium-44 was my first exposure to real nuclear physics. I was a senior in high school at the time and the magazine was part of a year-long subscription I had been given as a Christmas gift. I can't remember many details about it but, the article was about the discovery of this isotope in supernova remnants. A few things that blew my mind then and continue to fascinate me now are, for instance, you can do spectroscopy on distant star light. This was really amazing to me.

So we will have to see how these first few blogs go. Amazingly enough, despite growing up in "The Age of Technology" I have never blogged before. Oh well, instead of liking to hear my own voice I will have to learn to like my own typeset. Moving one, you are catching me at one of the more exciting (for a grad student) parts of being an experimentalist. This is my last day of working 5 am to 9 am shifts. I'm very excited because that means I can move my bedtime back from 9 pm to...well whenever I feel like it.

It's when you get a breather that you look back and see just how busy you've been. The nature of my job as outreach coordinator, and one of the reasons I like it so much, is a wide variety of responsibilities. Seems like I'm always adding more, and some keep getting pushed to the bottom of the pile because more urgent ones demand attention. So, apologies to those who give me work when I have other deadlines!

Is everybody else doing something they love? Is anybody?
I think about all the jobs I could be doing... all the ones I have done...