Someone Set Us Up The Bomb!
Well, Last Friday I went to work and saw a bomb stenciled to the door of the crane bay.
It was put there by someone trying to make some kind of anti-war statement on the nearby train bridge. They sprayed the words, "Is the war there or here?" over the road and put the bombs on the pillars.
I'm sure they saw that the sign out front read "Nuclear Physics Laboratory," thought that Nuclear = atomic bomb, and decided to add the bomb on the fly.
I'm Upset about it.
I don't make bombs at work, nothing close to it, nor even do research that has any direct way to even be turned into a bomb. The research done there is "nuclear" in so far as it deals with the nucleus of the atom and how it is held together. For this we use Helium. You know dangerous helium, what melts the eyes out of the heads of little kids at birthday parties... Wait! it doesn't do that at all; it's perfectly inert.
While the coolest thing most people can do with helium is suck it in and get their voice all high and funny (or double the fun with SF6) what we do is get them all spinning in the same direction with a laser and time how long it takes them to start spinning in random directions again. Yep, that's it. Well, it does all happen at 0.3 of a degree above absolute zero in order to slow them down some, but they just spin about like wobbly tops. At some point there will be neutrons in there too, also spinning, and we can see how they spin by how they are pulled into the Helium. This will tell us how the neutron (and most the stuff in the universe) is put together.
It's very similar to a conversation I had with one of my roommates. He asked were I was working once I got my new job. I told him the Nuclear Physics Lab, and he was all like, "Oh, with the bombs." and said no, we are looking for the neutron dipole moment and started talking on it. Now, his english is not the best coming from South America, and all he really got was "neutron" and he says, "Oh, like the one where the bomb leaves the building but cooks all the people. Haha." NO! Nothing to do with that. He wasn't listening anymore and I was leaving.
I would like to say:
1) The science of making atomic bombs is well established and doesn't need theoretical work. Making more bigger bombs is an engineering/efficacy problem and not much of a "what's it really doing and how?" problem.
2) The Neutron Bomb is about as real as the transporter from Star Trek. Sure the laws of physics allow for it, but only if you ignore the other laws of physics that make it crazy unlikely to ever do in what people call the "real world."
3) I'm surprised that he, a med student, would talk of something like that so flippantly.
My mother was in town for my birthday this last weekend and she was very concerned about my health because of radiation in the lab. THERE IS NONE! The most radioactive thing we have is the microwave; and it's just a microwave. In fact there's likely less than normal as the setup is at 0.3K and anything radioactive would cook the experiment (rather like a microwave).
I'll probably be the one that has to paint over the bomb too.
It was put there by someone trying to make some kind of anti-war statement on the nearby train bridge. They sprayed the words, "Is the war there or here?" over the road and put the bombs on the pillars.
I'm sure they saw that the sign out front read "Nuclear Physics Laboratory," thought that Nuclear = atomic bomb, and decided to add the bomb on the fly.
I'm Upset about it.
I don't make bombs at work, nothing close to it, nor even do research that has any direct way to even be turned into a bomb. The research done there is "nuclear" in so far as it deals with the nucleus of the atom and how it is held together. For this we use Helium. You know dangerous helium, what melts the eyes out of the heads of little kids at birthday parties... Wait! it doesn't do that at all; it's perfectly inert.
While the coolest thing most people can do with helium is suck it in and get their voice all high and funny (or double the fun with SF6) what we do is get them all spinning in the same direction with a laser and time how long it takes them to start spinning in random directions again. Yep, that's it. Well, it does all happen at 0.3 of a degree above absolute zero in order to slow them down some, but they just spin about like wobbly tops. At some point there will be neutrons in there too, also spinning, and we can see how they spin by how they are pulled into the Helium. This will tell us how the neutron (and most the stuff in the universe) is put together.
It's very similar to a conversation I had with one of my roommates. He asked were I was working once I got my new job. I told him the Nuclear Physics Lab, and he was all like, "Oh, with the bombs." and said no, we are looking for the neutron dipole moment and started talking on it. Now, his english is not the best coming from South America, and all he really got was "neutron" and he says, "Oh, like the one where the bomb leaves the building but cooks all the people. Haha." NO! Nothing to do with that. He wasn't listening anymore and I was leaving.
I would like to say:
1) The science of making atomic bombs is well established and doesn't need theoretical work. Making more bigger bombs is an engineering/efficacy problem and not much of a "what's it really doing and how?" problem.
2) The Neutron Bomb is about as real as the transporter from Star Trek. Sure the laws of physics allow for it, but only if you ignore the other laws of physics that make it crazy unlikely to ever do in what people call the "real world."
3) I'm surprised that he, a med student, would talk of something like that so flippantly.
My mother was in town for my birthday this last weekend and she was very concerned about my health because of radiation in the lab. THERE IS NONE! The most radioactive thing we have is the microwave; and it's just a microwave. In fact there's likely less than normal as the setup is at 0.3K and anything radioactive would cook the experiment (rather like a microwave).
I'll probably be the one that has to paint over the bomb too.