Uncertain Principles

The post title is a famous William Gibson quote, referring to the tendency of high-tech gadgets to be put to uses the manufacturers never expected. By "the Street," he meant people in general, with maybe a slant toward the sort of underclass element he focusses on in his books, but he might well have been referring to bored grad students. Witness Dylan Stiles and the Man-o-Meter, which assigns a numerical value to machismo, based on your skill at, in the words of one commenter, fellating a digital manometer.

We didn't get up to that much of this sort of foolishness in my lab, in part because the vacuum gauges we had didn't give sensible readings above one torr, but mostly because the laser lab offered fewer opportunities for self-measurement ("How long can you shock yourself with the Tesla coil" is a little too sadistic). We did have a post-doc spend an afternoon running a psychology experiment with a dye laser and a wavemeter-- he would grab people, and ask them to tune the laser wavelength until they would call the color of the light "yellow" without qualification ("greenish yellow" or "yellow-orange"). He claimed to find that "yellow" was a surprisingly narrow wavelength range-- something like two nanometers, but I don't think that got published anywhere (the Journal of Cat Vacuuming remains sadly nonexistant).

We also spent the better part of an afternoon attempting to make liquid oxygen. Or, rather, to prove that the liquid accumulating in a test tube dunked in liquid nitrogen was liquid oxygen (as somebody had heard). Despite one guy's conviction that we were about to blow up the lab, we never did get any impressive pyrotechnics. We did, however, discover both the liquid oxygen grill lighting movies, and the infamous exploding whale, so I regard it as an afternoon well spent.

Of course, Dylan has missed a really big opportunity here. One of our other post-docs once took a certain litigious religion founded by a hack writer up on their offer of a free consultation, and claimed to recognize their fancy meter as a certain type of Keithly electrometer, and speculated that the needle twitches they were looking at were nothing more than minute electrical fluctuations as he fidgeted with the probes they asked him to hold. Given that example, just think of the tax-free millions-- billions, even-- you could make off the Church of Manometer Fellation...

OK, maybe the name needs a little work...