{"id":236,"date":"2006-05-08T13:50:40","date_gmt":"2006-05-08T13:50:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/08\/true-lab-stories-the-sound-of\/"},"modified":"2006-05-08T13:50:40","modified_gmt":"2006-05-08T13:50:40","slug":"true-lab-stories-the-sound-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/08\/true-lab-stories-the-sound-of\/","title":{"rendered":"True Lab Stories: The Sound of Silence"},"content":{"rendered":"

A low-key True Lab Story, in honor of the previous post<\/a> on knowing more about your experiment than anybody else.<\/p>\n

One of the first times I had to run my grad school experiment all by myself, I had trouble getting the discharge in the metastable atom source to light. I went through all the usual steps, but nothing worked. Happily, the student who had built the experiment was still around, and working on writing up his thesis, so I went over to his office and told him what the problem was. He said “I’ll take a look,” and we headed over to the lab.<\/p>\n

Before we even got into the room, he started walking faster, and once we got inside marched directly the the cryopump (the same one from an earlier story<\/a>), and re-set it. “The cryopump was off,” he said. “That’ll fix it.”<\/p>\n

“How did you know that?” I asked. He looked baffled. “Couldn’t you hear it?” he said. I had no idea what he was talking about.<\/p>\n

Fast-foward a few years, to a time when I was working on writing up my own thesis, and some post-docs were running the experiment without me… <\/p>\n


\nOne morning, one of them came into my office and said, “The discharge won’t light.”<\/p>\n

“I’ll take a look,” I said, and we headed for the lab. And from the hall outside the door, I could hear it– the regular ka-chunk-ka-chunk<\/i> of the cryopump wasn’t there. All the other lab sounds were there– the rattilng mechanical pump, the high-pitched wine of the turbo pumps, the hum of the air handling, the rushing of the cooling water– but no cryopump.<\/p>\n

I opened the door, walked directly the the cryopump controller and re-set it. “The cryopump was off,” I said, “That’ll fix it.”<\/p>\n

“How did you know that?” they asked. I was genuinely baffled for a second. “Couldn’t you hear it?” I asked.<\/p>\n

And then, enlightenment dawned, and I realized it was time for me to graduate…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A low-key True Lab Story, in honor of the previous post on knowing more about your experiment than anybody else. One of the first times I had to run my grad school experiment all by myself, I had trouble getting the discharge in the metastable atom source to light. I went through all the usual… Continue reading True Lab Stories: The Sound of Silence<\/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":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lab_stories","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236","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=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}