I’m still feeling pretty lethargic, but I hope that will improve when I get to lecture about the EPR paradox in Quantum Optics today (it’s going to be kind of a short lecture, unless I can ad-lib an introduction to Bell’s Theorem at the end of the class, but then I’ve been holding them late […]
Category: Lab Stories
True Lab Stories: The Sodium Incident
For technical reasons, it turns out that alkali metal atoms are particularly good candidates for laser cooling. Rubidium is probably the most favorable of all of them– some atomic physicists jokingly refer to it as “God’s atom”– but all of the alkalis, even Francium, have been cooled and trapped. Of course, alkali metal elements are […]
True Lab Stories: The Plastic Lens
(Series explanation here.) The lab I worked in in grad school contained a bunch of miscellaneous objects whose purpose was a little hard to discern. One of the oddest was a big heavy acrylic lens. It was probably an inch thick, and two or three inches in diameter, and had four screw holes around the […]
True Lab Stories: The Water Fountain
(Series explanation here.) When I was in grad school, I worked in a lab with an incredibly high density of laser technology. We had not one but two Ti:sapphire systems, with 15 W argon ion lasers pumping Coherent 899 ring lasers, plus a pulsed YAG/ dye laser system, and a couple of miscellaneous diode lasers. […]
True Lab Stories: The Series
Every good blog needs a signature recurring element. Dave and Greta have Casual Fridays, RPM has Double Entendre Fridays, Grrlscientist has Birds in the News, PZ has Say Mean Things About Religious People Days-That-End-In-Y, Orac has EneMan… I’m not organized enough to commit to posting things in a certain category on a specific day of […]
Don’t Try This At Home
As a sort of cautionary counterpoint to the anecdote in my How to Tell a True Lab Story post, Derek Lowe has the story of somebody who pulled the same trick with a big commercial liquid nitrogen tank: The cylinder had been standing at one end of a ~20′ x 40′ laboratory on the second […]
How to Tell a True Lab Story
This is true. A guy I knew in graduate school, he had a buddy who was working late in the lab one night. He was all alone, and he got a little bored, so he took a two-liter soda bottle, and he filled it halfway up with liquid nitrogen. Then he screwed the cap on […]