I’m still feeling pretty lethargic, but I hope that will improve when I get to lecture about the EPR paradox in Quantum Optics today (it’s going to be kind of a short lecture, unless I can ad-lib an introduction to Bell’s Theorem at the end of the class, but then I’ve been holding them late for three weeks already…). In an effort to perk myself up through blogging, here are some amusing tales about mishaps involving electricity.<\/p>\n
(First, a disclaimer: Though these stories are presented in a manner that (hopefully) makes them sound amusing, most of what I describe here is, in fact, incredibly stupid. It’s a wonder I’m still alive, I’m such a jackass. Please be careful around high-voltage sources.)<\/p>\n
Idiocy below the cut. The common theme (other than electrocution) is the oft-cited definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and expecting a different result.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Story the First: Beginning with the lowest voltage, and lowest level of stupidity, there was a power strip bolted to the side of an equipment rack in my lab in grad school. It was kind of old, so you really needed to haul on a plug to get it back out, and the best procedure was to put one hand on the top of the strip, while pulling the plug out with the other.<\/p>\n
Of course, the other charming feature of the power strip in question was that it had a cracked fuse cover. Meaning that there was an exposed metal bit with line voltage on it, right at the top of the strip. Which I discovered one day when I was swapping a bunch of components in and out, and kept plugging and unplugging power supplies. Every time I unplugged something, I felt this stabbing pain in my left hand, which I’m embarassed to say I didn’t connect with the power strip until about the third time it happened. And then, having realized what the problem was, I confirmed it by…. touching the top of the broken fuse cover, and shocking myself again.<\/p>\n
Story the Second: In grad school, I was working with metastable rare-gas atoms (specifically, metastable xenon). These atoms need to be put in an excited state before you can do laser cooling with them, or even spectroscopy so you can stabilize your laser to the atomic signal, so we cycled through a variety of different schemes for creating a plasma discharge as a reference source.<\/p>\n
The source we used when I first got there was a DC discharge, based on an old HeNe laser tube, which worked by running a miliamp or so of current through the gas between two electrode with 800 V or so between them. This was set up out in the middle of a 4’x8′ optical table, so it was difficult to bump into by accident.<\/p>\n
However, another feature of the lock circuit was an acousto-optical modulator that needed daily adjusting to tweak up the signal. The AOM wound up placed so that one of its adjustment knobs was a few inches away from the exposed hot electrode of the discharge cell.<\/p>\n
To tweak the lock signal up, you needed to make small adjustments to this knob, and look at how they affected the size of the peaks on an oscilloscope trace. The previous student, who set the whole thing up, was a good eight inches shorter than I am, so he did this by walking around the table to adjust the knob, then walking back to see the effect, and repeating as necessary.<\/p>\n
Being both tall and lazy (laziness is the father of invention), I figured out that I could reach the adjustment knob from the same side of the table as the scope. This, however, put my hand right next to the high-voltage electrode, at a time when I was necessarily looking the other way, at the scope.<\/p>\n
Which is how it came to be that I am intimately familiar with the feeling of eight hundred volts entering my left arm. The first time that happened, I said (once I stopped hopping around the lab saying “fuckfuckfcukfuck”), “Well, I’ll be sure never to do that again.”<\/p>\n
The fourth time it happened, we decided to change to an RF-based excitation scheme, that didn’t involve high voltage at all.<\/p>\n
I have more stupid electrical tricks stories, but this ought to be enough for one post. And I’m a little more awake now…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m still feeling pretty lethargic, but I hope that will improve when I get to lecture about the EPR paradox in Quantum Optics today (it’s going to be kind of a short lecture, unless I can ad-lib an introduction to Bell’s Theorem at the end of the class, but then I’ve been holding them late… Continue reading True Lab Stories: The Definition of Insanity<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,25,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiment","category-lab_stories","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}