Laz0r Safety and Other Stories

08Feb07

Yesterday was my first Junior Lab session, and we spent most of it hashing out the usual first-day logistics – finding partners, getting notebooks, looking at the experiments, and so on. My section is led by Prof. Peter Fisher, who, in addition to being an awesome physicist, tells the greatest anecdotes. For instance, while introducing the Mossbauer Spectroscopy apparatus:

You know, I actually knew Mossbauer. He was always hanging around, and I have to say, he was kind of a jerk. He figured out how to do this experiment, and it worked, and he got the Nobel Prize about the next week. It was that important. And when you’re that young, and you already have a Nobel, well, you don’t care what people think.

I looked up Mossbauer’s Nobel. He was born in 1929, did the experiments around 1958, and won the prize in 1961, at which point he was 32 years old. Which, damn, I had better come up with something profound to do within the next eight years… Well, Mossbauer is Anna’s and my first experiment of the term. Maybe we’ll make a discovery.

And then Peter showed us the Doppler-Free Spectroscopy gadgetry. It’s laser spectroscopy, so of course it includes lasers, and anyone planning on doing that experiment is required to take a laser-safety course. Which sounds like FUN, no? No.

But thus spake Peter:

Lasers are powerful things, and are capable of depositing a whole lot of energy in a very short time. [Some publication] once found someone who’d lost his sight due to a laser and had him write a paragraph or two on how it felt…he said that just before you go blind, you’ll hear a little noise like *pop*! That’s the sound of your vitreous humor boiling.

Yeah, suddenly I’m all for laser safety courses. Bring them on, PLEASE.

I suspect lab will be lots of fun this term.

Filed under: classes, hilarity   |  2 Comments