In which I think I am an experimentalist

09Mar07

Damn, world, it has been a while. I hope you’ve been well.

This was one of THOSE weeks, by which I mostly mean I had a Junior Lab presentation + paper due. So I spent last weekend wracked with spasms of data analysis, trying to find decent initial conditions for fitting 12 lorentzians plus a gaussian to one set of data and cursing matlab and athena and my computer. But the reward was a damn gorgeous hyperfine spectrum of magnetite, if I do say so myself, and several other lovely plots as well. Oh, you wanna see? Okay look:

And if that does not make your heart beat a little faster, well, either 1) you are far saner than I, or 2) you’ve never taken Junior Lab.

And if it does, well, there’s more where that came from. Aww so pretty.

I think, though, that I need to limit my hours spent in Junior Lab. I’m officially scheduled for lab six hours per week, on Monday and Wednesday mornings — but then there’s Open Lab on Fridays, and from noon until 2 daily, and nobody really minds me going in during another section, and so on… Lab is disturbingly addictive, actually. If Anna and I work efficiently, we can usually finish the prescribed experiments in three of our five allotted days, which leaves us two sections (and a week of realtime) to play. By which I mean my favorite part of Jlab: digging through the cupboards and through arxiv and through wikipedia for other cool things to do with a given apparatus. And then appropriating and occasionally misappropriating whatever I can find to scrabble together something-or-other. And then HAVING IT WORK.

Actually, maybe that’s the best thing about experiments. MIT’s physics courses do grind you down some, and it’s been a while since I’ve thought it obvious that I Can Do Physics, and a longer while since I’ve placed complete trust in my brains to get me through things. But experiments are as much about figuring out how to do things, and as such they reward the goofball sneaky thinking I’m actually decent at.

Oh, my other new best friend? The Real World. By which I mean, the one I used to snort at and brush off. The one with friction and air resistance and things which are not, in fact, spheres, with all the mess and all the crap. But I have come to realize something truly glorious, which is: The Real World always works. Unlike me, it is never off by a factor of two. It doesn’t make sign errors. It never fails to realize that something is impossible, and it’s never swayed by the prevailing theory of the moment.

Also, it is just pretty.

Filed under: classes, how to be a scientist, life   |  4 Comments