True Lab Stories: Career Tracks

Back when I was an undergrad, I spent the summer before my senior year on campus working on my thesis project (trying to build a MOT for rubidium, which never did work). That same summer, one of the guys I did problem sets with, we’ll call him J., who was only a rising junior, was working with the oldest member of the faculty on a different experimental project.

My summer actually went pretty well, but J. and his advisor had one of those nightmare stretches where absolutely nothing would work right. Something would break, and when they got it fixed, something else would break. It was awful, and J. was pretty bummed.

Several weeks into this, they’re in the lab one day, and J.’s advisor turns to him, out of the blue, and says “Have you considered a career in theoretical physics?”

(Punch line below the fold…)

A couple of weeks later, they’re working on something involving the very expensive (~$5K) picovolt amplifier they had for the signals they were looking for, and they unhook all the connections to work on it. J.’s advisor tinkers around with it for a while, gets whatever he was working on nailed down to his satisfaction, and goes to re-connect it.

At this point, there are two BNC cables lying on the table. One is the picovolt signal that they’re looking to amplify, the other is a 15 volt power supply.

Without even looking, J.’s advisor reaches behind him, grabs a cable, and plugs it in. and immediately burns out his $5K amplifier by sticking the 15V power supply into the input.

As we told J. later, that would’ve been the perfect opportunity to turn to him and say “So, have you considered a career in theoretical physics?” Unfortunately, J. was much too nice a kid to do that, but we all had a good laugh about it.

(The faculty member in question retired at the end of that year, after thirty-odd years in experimental physics…)