Lab Stories
Category archives for Lab Stories
Murphy Violation in Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 2, 2010 Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau proposes an an experimental test of Murphy’s Law using the lottery. While amusing, it’s ultimately flawed– Murphy’s Law is something of the form: Anything that can go wrong, will. Accordingly, it can only properly be applied to situations in which there is a reasonable expectation of success, unless something goes…
Eucatastrophe in Physics
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 18, 2010 Before leaving Austin on Friday, I had lunch with a former student who is currently a graduate student at the University of Texas, working in an experimental AMO physics lab. I got the tour before lunch– I’m a sucker for lab tours– and things were pretty quiet, as they had recently suffered a catastrophic failure…
What Keeps Me Up at Night
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 2, 2009 One of my pet peeves about physics as perceived by the public and presented in the media is the way that everyone assumes that all physicists are theoretical particle physicists. Matt Springer points out another example of this, in this New Scientist article about the opening panel at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival. The panel…
My Doomsday Weapon
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 14, 2009 In the time that I’ve been at Union, I have suffered a number of lab disasters. I’ve had lasers killed in freak power outages. I’ve had lasers die because of odd electrical issues. My lab has flooded not once, not twice, but three different times. I’ve had equipment damaged by idiot contractors, and I’ve had…
We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges, But We Do Have Some
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 12, 2009 Dave Ng has recently upgraded the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique site, which provides a variety of achievement badges for members to claim and post. I’m not a big one for extra graphics on the blog (they delay the loading of the cute baby pictures), but if you’re…
The Metastable Xenon Project
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 4, 2008 Over the past several weeks, I’ve written up ResearchBlogging posts on each of the papers I helped write in graduate school. Each paper write-up was accompanied by a “Making of” article, giving a bit more detail about how the experiments came to be, what my role in them was, and whatever funny anecdotes I can…
The Making of “Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma”
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 2, 2008 As mentioned in the previous post, the cold plasma experiment was the last of the metastable xenon papers that I’m an author on. My role in these experiments was pretty limited, as I was wrapping things up and writing my thesis when the experiments were going on. The main authors on this were Tom Killian,…
“Quantum Mechanics Is Magic”: The Making of “Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions”
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 2, 2008 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…
A One-Afternoon Experiment: The Making of “Time Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions” (part 1)
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 28, 2008 As I said in the introduction to the previous post, this was the first paper on which I was the lead author, and it may be my favorite paper of my career to date. I had a terrific time with it, and it led to enough good stories that I’m going to split the making-of…
Time-Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 28, 2008 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…
