Scenes from a Wednesday

14Feb07

I have jlab this morning from 9-12. It’s precipitating in little stinging freezy bits outside, so I wait for the shuttle, which gets itself stuck in a long lineup of 18-wheelers. There’s a truck on Mass. Ave covered in swamp-monster black goo. The pavement beneath it has buckled and broken; against the newly-fallen snow, it looks like the end of the world. I’m late to lab.

….

Anna is taking a Mössbauer exposure. It’s absolutely gorgeous, with six lovely Zeeman-splitting peaks in all the right places. We flaunt our data before Sasha and Mark, who are performing the same experiment on a separate apparatus. I think Sasha is hilarious — he’s the enthusiastic puppy-dog of everything physics. He has wide brown eyes and wild brown hair and is so incredibly earnest about everything that it’s hard to believe he’s been here three years. Every so often he’ll produce a tiny digital camera, look around for the professors, and whisper, “Take a picture of us!” Then he’ll stand by the apparatus, grinning goofily in genuine delight.

….

Nancy from the Physics Department office has made us cupcakes as a token of her love. It’s nice to be loved, especially if there’s food involved.

….

Sasha has involved Prof. Yamamoto in a discussion of…I don’t know what. I think it’s from Scott’s GR class. He mentions Sean Carroll’s textbook, which makes me feel worldly, because I read the blog of someone important. Who writes textbooks.

Suddenly Sasha grimaces in pain and cries, “Yes, but in the sense of the deeper truth –”. Mark gives him a wry glance. Anna and I can’t stop laughing. “You just have to accept it,” Yamamoto says. “Physics is a religion. First you believe, and then you’ll come to understand it.” I write that in my lab book, because it seems profound. It’s just below the quote from Peter that says “Don’t touch the source and then pick your nose.”

Anna says Sasha reminds her of Dostoevsky. I write that down, too.

….

High-density Mössbauer samples take FOREVER to run.

….

I spend the two hours before seminar in the common room, reading over the assigned papers. Some of them say funny things. For instance:

Astronomers (not only those at Lick) sustain a cultural tradition of fashionable foolishness. The mortuary of make-believe planets contains numerous tombstones, and many astronomers lugged these planets to their private graves. (Marcy & Butler 1999)

Or:

The survey implies a star-brown dwarf binary frequency of less than 1%, although more than one specimen is needed to make this statement significantly meaningful.(Oppenheimer, Kulkarni, & Stauffer)

HA.
….

A girl — I don’t know her name — is working on a nuclear&particle problem set with another guy. He says something about cross-sections and orders of magnitude. I look up: I like cross-sections! But the girl snorts. “I HATE scattering!” she says. The guy wonders what she’s doing in particle physics, if that’s the case. “I really hate scattering. I just want to play with quarks!”

I go to seminar.

….

Max is running down the hallway. Why is Max always running down the hallways? I shout a greeting at him, at which point he stops running.
“Hey Max,” I say, “when you’re beginning a Nobel speech, and you say ‘Your Majesties, your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,’ who are the Majesties and who are the Highnesses?”

Max scratches his head and says he was just at a Nobel ceremony, so he should know…he tells me that it’s important to bow to the correct people. I assure him I’ll keep in practice. Just in case.

Will profs I know win Nobels? I mean, the ones I know well enough to chat with in the hallways. I’ve had the odd recitation with Wilczek or Ketterle, but I wouldn’t know what to say to them. Although I guess I could ask about the Highnesses.

Will students I know win Nobels? Will Sasha?

Oh man, that would be the greatest speech ever.

….

Note to you people waiting for seminar notes: there are a lot of figures this week. Give me a day to Inkscape those up.

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