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Warning - Rabid Physics Geekiness Ahead. Read At Your Own Risk.

Due to one of my lecturers being completely slack and unable to organise any actual labs to take place in our laboratory slot, I had to go on a tour of the Dept of Electronic Materials Engineering (over in the research school) today. Which would have been fine, if I hadn't already done it four times. It's getting to the stage I could run the damn tour myself. *sigh*

Needless to say, I was not looking forwards to the afternoon, but it actually turned out alright, mostly because we got the basic engineering type stuff out of the way fast, and then went round the other interesting departments - Nuclear physics, Plasma Physcis, and Atom Optics. We got to see the nuclear accelerator, which is honestly rather boring if you've seen it before (which I had - the scary lift has not gotten any less scary). However, I did get to spend quite a bit of time catching up with one of my old lecturers, discussing everything from the best places to do PhDs, to the best way to slaughter pigs. There are times when I love working in an abattoir... Oh, and Ger-rad was there too, so that was interesting.

They also told me about some paper which came out recently, using general relativity to analyse the universe/galaxy and all its wonderful interactions, the upshot of which seems to be that you may not need to invoke dark matter to explain the behaviour and formation of galaxies. Must go dig up a copy, and read it myself. Would be nice if it was right - I don't have anything against dark matter per se, but I personally think it would be a lot more elegant to be able to explain cosmological-type things without inventing new stuff left right and centre. Of course, I'm not an astrophysicist, so it probably all makes perfect sense to them.

Apart from that, the rest of the tour was fairly standard. Always interesting to hear physicists try and explain laser cooling to a bunch or engineering students, many of whom wouldn't recognise a laser if they tripped over it. You know, I haven't really thought about it before, given how much time I spent messing around with them in physics, but do you use lasers at all in the undergrad engineering course?

__happy__,

wolfwarrior did you guys get to?

Anyway, there were a fair few blank faces, but I thought it was fairly interesting, especially looking at the setup for creating BECs (Bose-Einstein Condensates, for the uninitiated). Atom lasers, anyone?

Moronic question of the day - When looking at a prototype testing chamber for plasma thrusters (you know, to use for space ships), a girl asked 'so, isn't it a little small? I mean, wouldn't you need like hundreds of these to push a space ship?" Well, yes moron, this is why this is PROOF OF CONCEPT only... I mean, nice as it would be to build a full-scale plasma engine before they even know if this type works properly, it may get a tad expensive. Thinking back, she was annoying through the whole thing... I think some people just can't help it.

Random Observation of the Day - Sometimes, my geekiness astounds even me...