I was sitting in my office on campus, working on some computer stuff, when I noticed a bunch of guys from Facilities out in the hall, bustling around doing something. A few minutes later, one of them stopped right outside my door, and called into the main Facilities office on his cell phone. “We’re up […]
Category: My Lab
The Fine Line Between Plagiarism and Necessary Repetition
My senior thesis student this year came to my office today to ask a question as he’s starting to work on writing his thesis. I’ve given him copies of the theses of the last couple of students to work in my lab, and asked him to start on a draft of the background sections. He […]
Me On TV (On the Internet)
As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here: This was the first time I’ve done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
Hands of Science
SteelyKid has recently begun to figure out her hands. As I noted last week, within the last couple of weeks, she’s started to be able to reliably grab things near her. Just within the last few days, she’s discovered that she has two hands, and they can interact with each other: She’s started grabbing one […]
Science Blogging: What Is It Good For?
I got some interesting comments on last week’s post about the science blogging bubble, and there were two in particular I wanted to highlight. Bee wrote (among other things): But what I think are further obstacle to blogging is the inappropriateness of the medium to science. E.g. blogs put by format an emphasis on novelty, […]
“Quantum Mechanics Is Magic”: The Making of “Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions”
This was the last of the experiments that I did for my thesis (it’s not the last xenon paper I’m an author on, but the work for that one was done while I was writing up), so my memories of it are bound up with the thesis-writing process. My favorite story about this stuff was […]
Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions
This is the last of the five papers that were part of my Ph.D. thesis, and at ten journal pages in length, it’s the longest thing I wrote. It was also the longest-running experiment of any of the things I did, with the data being taken over a period of about three years, between and […]
Time-Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions
This paper is the third of the articles I wrote when I was a grad student, and the first one where I was the lead author. It’s also probably my favorite of the lot, not just because of the role it played in my career, but because it packs a lot of science into four […]
It’s 4am
It’s four am, and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in a white house, and it’s ringing. Something is happening in the lab. What do you want to answer that phone? Is it a physicist with the experience and knowledge to deal with the apparatus? Even if he’s only just gotten […]
Scooped; or, The Making of “Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices”
The experiment described in the previous post was published in early 1998, but the work was done in 1997. This was the year when things really turned around for me in grad school– the optical control paper was done in the summer 0f ’94, and ’95 and ’96 were just a carnival of pain. Everything […]