I tend to fold under pressure.

So basically, my brain shuts down when I'm under pressure.
Miss an entrance to a scene? Yea, expect my diction to be gone.
Don't get the first problem on a math test? Most likely won't get any after that, either.

I was taking the bus, and didn't have a nifty Charlie card with me. I had a ton of old tickets with me, so I thought I could just use those all up. Sadly, though, one can only use one ticket per ride.
I did not know this.
I put mine in, to find it had 50c on it. So, I had to scrape up an extra $3.
But of course, I got pressured.
So, I put the first dollar bill in the ticket slot. Or tried to.
The driver, taking pity on me, put it in the dollar bill slot.
Okay, I thought, let's do better.
I put the next one in...the ticket slot.
Oh dear lord. Buy the third time, the driver chuckled a bit at me.
"You're doing pretty good, here."
I think I'll stick to walking from now on.


Marena

Oddities 101

Some more odd snippets from my classes:

My neuroscience teacher was talking about aphasia or something. She had been talking non-stop for close to an hour, so naturally, the entire class was starting to space out. I was doodling absentmindedly in the margins of my notebook (with this awesome fountain pen I randomly found in my house- I can write all calligraphishly!) when I heard a squeaking noise coming from the open window. I look over... and see a huge moving black object. A bookcase. A big, ceiling height, black bookcase on wheels that was being pushed across the sidewalk. Soon, the bookcase had the entire classes attention, as we stared, transfixed, while it passed us by.

My history teacher brought a measuring tape to class. It was one of those construction worker types, the ones that you can pull out forever and then they snap back in. It was ridiculously amusing. I played with it at the beginning of the class, but then my friend stretched it across the entire classroom, and my teacher took it away and rested it on the chalk holder of the black board. I patiently abided my time until the class got distracted again, as it always does. Then I snuck up to the board- like a ninja!- and quickly swiped the measuring tape before returning to my seat. I resumed playing with it, but it got taken again before long. So I waited again, and again managed to steal it. This time, the teacher tried to take it away even earlier, so I gave it to my friend to keep it away from him. Instead, she HANDS it over, smirking, and the teacher, finally learning from my sneakiness, put the measuring tape in his pocket.

<3 Helen

I was going to demonstrate...

We had a few extra comet tails that were too skinny to use and we didn't know what to do with them... 

Lamb Ears

Narwhal and Unicorn

Goat Horns

Antennae/Antelope

TUSKS!

-Marianne, Rebecca, and Sachi

Bugger it!

As far as bugs go, I am not having a good day. Considering it's only 1:44 AM and I've already two bug encounters, the rest of the day is not looking up either. First, I come home after a night of Vietnamese food, buying books at Borders, and babysitting for the kids down the street (who have ant problems in their house, I should have known right then that'd be the start of it.) I sit down in my room with a book and my laptop, start to read when all of a sudden there's a loud persistent buzzing noise. I look up. A fly has somehow found its way into my room and is buzzing around like mad. A HUGE fly. A LOUD fly. And a STUPIDLY PERSISTENT fly. I try and ignore it at first, but it doesn't stop buzzing! Ugh. So I try and shoo it out. No luck. I keep the door open, reading and listening to that annoying buzzing when all of a sudden it comes close. Aha! I shove it out the door with my book. Unfortunately it comes back in before I can close the door. Three more tries and no luck and I give up. Ten minutes later, even more annoyed by the sound of the buzzing I try again. Success! The fly is out, the door is closed. Then all of a sudden I hear a faint muffled buzzing and the sound of a fly hitting my door. It's trying to get back in! Why on Earth?! Plink, plink, plink, then all of a sudden the buzzing isn't muffled. The freaking fly just flew under the centimeter crack under my door and back into my room! It's buzzing around everywhere! Why does it like my room so much?

Well, no matter, I finally shoo it out again, and this time it doesn't come back in. After taking a nice relaxing shower and forgetting about the fly, I pick up the book I'm reading, I just bought today: Exploring Chaos edited by Nina Hall. As I'm reading I get up to page 60, and it talks about fluid dynamics. Smack dab in the middle of the page there is a flattened half of a mosquito with a little flattened wing. On the middle of page 61 is the other half. I just bought this book! Someone in the bookstore decided it was a good idea to just pick up a random book and smash a mosquito in between pages 60 and 61! Because of course they had NOTHING else to smash it with. Yeah, right. So I just cleaned as much as I could off with a random sock but seriously? I am not having a good bug day.


Sachi

Creativeness - a Creative Way to Say Creativity

Today we kind of went crazy, spending the afternoon making a plush comet, through some interesting conversation. It all started when Sachi and Rebecca found a website on which you could buy plush subatomic particles (you should see it - http://www.particlezoo.net/). Then we decided to make our own plush scientific somethings, and after a fair amount of discussion, we decided to make a comet. I had the job of stuffing the comet tails, and eventually I left, explaining that I was tired from stuffing tails. We then thought about how many situations one could say "I was stuffing tails!" Soon Philip came home to write a scientific paper, and when he entered the room where we were sewing our comet, we desperately tried to explain to him what we were doing and why we were making a plush comet. He didn't seem to understand, however, and kept saying that our comet tails looked like tusks. He tried to take one from me and I snatched it back while asking him what he was doing. He replied haughtily, "I was going to demonstrate."

Rebecca was trying to sew the head of the comet to the comet tails using a running stitch and having trouble. Sachi suggested using a circular stitch and Rebecca agreed that that was much easier. Sachi said, "Engineering, it works! That's my motto. Or more like Science, it works! Math, it works! The scientific method, it works!"

A little while later, Sachi said, "We could make a giant squid." I responded, "We could make a life-sized giant squid. I want a beanbag chair that looks like a giant squid and you can position the tenticles however you want."

"Oh, there could be a giant squid beanbag for a kindergarten classroom and each student would have their own tentacle."She went on to say how there didn't even need to be a squid, it could just be a collection of disembodied tentacles. Around this point in time, we decided to write a blog entry about our experiences. I volunteered to get a laptop from downstairs. Soon after, I emerged, completely wrapped in cords and wires. I explained that I had to store the many cords somewhere, although when I was unwrapping myself, it became quite inconvenient.

It took a while, but then we finished the comet.  Sachi takes it, and squeals,  "NEEEEHUG!"   I look up from my laptop.  "Wait, say that again, I want to blog it."  "NEHUGNEEE," Sachi squeals again, hugging the comet.  "Could you say it a bit slower?" I ask.   Sachi shakes her head impatiently. "NEEEHUGNEEEEHUUUUUGGG."


-Marianne and Sachi (who only wrote a paragraph)

PS: 100th Blog Post! Yay!
PPS: You should all read Philip's scientific paper...

Infinite(ly Strange) Corridor

Strange things happen in the halls of MIT. Admittedly, it's widely known as a geek school, so you're bound to get some wacky people there... nd you can never overestimate the strangeness of Asian tourists, but some oddities of the past few days surprised even me. (And you know from this blog that there are no shortage of oddities in my life.)

As my friends and I were walking down one of the many, many "corridors" yesterday (actually, two days ago, since it's past midnight now) a lady stepped out from behind one of those frosted doors... and offered us cupcakes. She told us they were vegan cupcakes. Now, I love cupcakes, really, who doesn't? So of course, we couldn't refuse. I mean, they were just so cute! At the time, it didn't seem out of place at all to be offered sweets by a stranger...

Today was even stranger. Ok, so when you walk into MIT from the huge Mass Ave entrance, you find yourself in the "little" dome. If you say anything, or laugh, it echoes, loudly. I guess one of the Asian tourists realized that today, because as we walked towards the dome, we heard singing. Not normal, humdum singing, or even American Idol wannabe singing. No, this was full-on operatic singing. When we finally got to the dome, the singing had stopped, but we spent five minutes curiously looking around, and up, to find the source of the mysterious singing. Just as we were about to leave, one of the tourists not too far from us started his singing again. Gotta give the guy props for having the courage to do that.

<3 Helen

Forever (Too) Young

So I take the T (that's the subway for you non-Bostonians) to MIT for class everyday. I have a schedule. I leave my house at 4, walk to the Boston College stop, take the B line to Hynes Convention Center, then take the #1 bus from there to MIT. However, the #1 bus is notoriously unreliable.

I get off the T today, as usual, but I knew my CharlieCard (this little plastic debit card thingy for the T) was running low, so I stopped at a spiffy little machine to add a few dollars. Unfortunately, this caused me to miss the bus. It was just pulling away as I walked up the subway stairs onto the street.

I guess this random guy saw me looking after the bus forlornly, because he stated talking to me, first saying that I had just missed the bus. I laughed and tried to go back to listening to my music, but he just would NOT stop talking. And I like to think of myself as a generally polite person, so I put my iPod away and talked to him.

It started out fairly normal. He asked me where I was from, and we talked about China for a bit. (Well, actually, he went on about how messed up it was that the US was taking all of China's money and I nodded and refrained from saying much.) Except then he asked my age. When I replied I was 15, he was surprised and said he was going to ask me out, but obviously he can't if I'm 15 cuz that's like, you know, illegal. I wasn't exactly sure how to respond to that, so I was seriously relieved when my friend who's in my class showed up and I followed her to buy some candy. So yeah, sketchy.

<3 Helen

This Side Up

Today I woke up- as per usual to the sound of people hacking away at some wall or other. Got on my laptop, started IMing people until randomly the power shut off. "Not that switch!" Someone yells. Power back on...I explain to the people I'm talking to that I would probably lose power again soon. Power off. "Not that one either!" This repeats several times until they say "That one!" I find that they have turned the basement power off, which includes the internet. Oh well, I take it in stride. It's a nice day, I'll go hang out with a friend.

I wander over across the hall where I knew there would be a basket of clean clothes. Instead I find a man taking the comic books off the shelf of a bookcase in an otherwise barren room. "Quite a project," I say, looking around, not knowing the extent of how it really was. I also inquired as to why he turned the power off, but he had no clue, not being part of the group that was responsible for that. In search of my clothes I followed him down the hall to another room. This room contains a bed that is stacked high with furniture in front of it, and baskets of stuff on top. I spied my clothes at the back of the mess, but not being able to reach them I retreated back into my room and grabbed the last clean outfit I had.

Out for the day I missed all the activity going on. When I returned home I made a beeline for my laptop, only to realize the internet was still not working despite the power being back on. I headed to the source, the office, but stacked in front of the office was a piano, a couch, two chairs, a table, two lamps and three bags filled with who knows what junk. I use the couch to vault over the piano and lamps, stepping carefully over the bags to reach the computer and modem, both of which are unplugged. Staring at the mess of cords on the floor, I decide to give up on that, and vault back over the piano and back up to my room.

As I sit in my room, my mother knocks on my door looking for a space to sit, since the rest of the house other than my room and two bathrooms has been taken over. I had no choice but to let her in, and once we were sharing the small space that was my bedroom (which the builders had already started to pile what little i had into a box so they could do electrical work) she felt obligated to make conversation. Forced out of my own room in search of somewhere I could sit without being bothered I ended up in the abandoned room across the hall which only contained a bed frame, and which I recently learned would be my new sleeping space for the next week (I would get a mattress on the floor.) Turning the doorknob, a piece of metal sprung out and a loose spring stuck out of the handle. So I sat against the dirty wall and thought.

I had an idea—I went to grab my violin. Violins were portable, and self contained. I even knew which box my music was in. All excited, I took it out and tuned it, started to play, and then realized my fingernails were way too long. Slightly downcast, I went in search of nail clippers. First I checked the boxes in my mother’s room where they had demolished her bathroom and left all the cabinet items in shopping bags—no luck. I knew I had taken the ones that used to be in my case with me to camp, and that my suit case, still unpacked, was in the room down the hall, so I checked that out knowing it was probably a lost cause.

Indeed, the mountain of stuff had only grown—two mattresses, one cabinet, and one bookshelf blocked access to a mound of books, clothes, suitcases, backpacks and other paraphernalia. No way I was getting in there right now. Finally my mother was kind enough to help out, restart the internet and find a pair of nail clippers. I played violin for a while, we went out for dinner, and when we returned we set out on a search and rescue mission for urgent and important items. We crawled around mattresses, over bags and boxes and retrieved clothes and textbooks for the next few days. So as I sit here typing, most of this has been resolved, though I still have to move out of my room. I can’t wait until I go off to camp again.


Sachi

They Made it All Up!

As promised, I bring you more stories from my CTY chemistry class.

One time we were trying this experiment in class, where the teacher, an old balding man who was slightly crazy and always made drug references, had filled a cone shaped flask with a blue liquid, stoppered the top and put a thin glass tube through the stopper. "I'm going to put my hands around the flask and because the gas expands, a drop of the blue liquid should shoot out the top of the tube." As he puts his hands around the glass he says "I am so hot..." We all laugh. We continue staring at the tube, but nothing happens. "Guess you're not hot enough!" One student remarks.

Another time the teacher was writing an equation up on the board involving a chemical "S₂O₈".
"What's its name?" He asks. There was a silence.
The person sitting next to me speaks up, "Zoë?"
"Close," He says. "Sodium thiosulfate. Maybe Zoë was its given name. So why can't we do anything with it?"
Another great silence and the person sitting next to me tries again. "Because you don't like it?"
"Yes, I don't like Zoë," the teacher concludes.

Us talking the second to last day:
"I talked to the god Ares," our teacher is saying for some reason.
"Mr. O, how do you know all this?" a kid asks about the story he's telling.
"I make it up. If it sounds good, it's true." Mr. O says.
"We're talking about the gods, right? Not the chemistry?" another student asks.

Edit: Apparently sodium thiosulfate is Na₂S₂O₃. Just FYI.


Sachi

Boiled Bananas

Since I'm sure Philip made you curious by saying there was a story about frozen bananas, I suppose I'll have to tell it. You probably know that lucky Philip has access to liquid nitrogen. Yesterday, Sachi and I had the marvelous opportunity to drop a banana in it. And then eat it. (The banana, not the liquid nitrogen!!!) 

Here is the recipe:

Obtain a bucket of liquid nitrogen.

Bring it to a boil (A temperature above 77 Kelvin will do--that's negative 321 degrees Fahrenheit)

Drop a banana in.

Fruitlessly (ha! pun-ness!) try to remove the banana (failing because you don't want to dip your fingers in too.)

Come to the conclusion that you should pour out some of the nitrogen so the banana sticks out farther.

Pour out some of the liquid nitrogen and watch the droplets skittle across the floor.

Remove the banana.

Drop on the ground repeatedly until it breaks into small chunks.

Wait for the chunks to get warmer (you can play with the liquid nitrogen during this time)

Pull off the peels and eat the frozen banana! But try not to eat parts that touched the possibly chemical-covered floor.

(Note: There's a good chance there will be a rule that you're not allowed to eat in the lab. This is probably why. My advice is to try to make sure people don't see you eating the banana. It worked for us.)

If that wasn't enough to make our day exciting, we also confused people on cell-phones. How is this done? Well, you give just enough information to make what you're doing sound strange. (Of course, you have to be doing slightly strange things in the first place.) Here are some examples:

*Ringing* "Hi! We're sitting on top of a statue. (more conversation) Eeek! Sorry, I was falling off." (It was an odd abstract shape, with many comfortable sitting places on it, none of which were more than three feet from the ground. She did start to fall, but it wasn't at all dangerous.)

*Ringing* "Hi! I'm outside on a window ledge."

*another phone rings* "Hi dad! I'm at MIT. We played with liquid nitrogen."

(-Did you tell him where you got liquid nitrogen? -No, only that I was at MIT.)

-Rebecca

Attention Passengers: The Next Red Line Train to Death is Now Approaching

In case you haven't noticed (maybe you don't take the Red Line twice every day as I do), the Red Line goes very slowly over the Longfellow Bridge. I used to wonder at this, finding it strange and annoying, as the Red Line is otherwise quite fast and smooth, and this bridge part is a blot on its otherwise amazing record. Upon hearing me mention this, my father said that it was indeed peculiar, since he remembered the Red Line going as fast as anywhere else over the bridge. He suggested that maybe after the bridge collapsed in Minnesota a while ago, they decided to be more careful. Then one day on the radio, we heard some mention of people not using the Red Line because of something about the bridge. Wondering what it was that had gone wrong (as I had missed the beginning of the story), I decided to take a risk. Nothing was any different from any other time I took the Red Line, so I relaxed. But the next day I found out that the Longfellow Bridge had been temporarily closed because of infrastructure problems, and that infrastructure problems explained the slow subways. I then joked that since I take the Red Line twice every day, the chance that I would be on the bridge when it collapsed was not quite infinitesmal, let us say. So from then on, I decided to consider the situation of a collapsing bridge while riding the Red Line. I noticed that the doors open sideways, so water pressure would not be a problem if one were trying to escape. I also noticed that there is a slight gap under the doors, so the trains would not be able to float. So escaping before the train sinks would be the trick. I mentioned this to Sachi today, after we had a nice snack of bananas frozen in liquid nitrogen (it's really good, and there's a story to this as well, but I'll leave it to someone else to write about it in the blog if she wants). Sachi thought it was funny that I actually analyzed the situation so logically and seriously. This brought our discussion to the 1950s educational film "Duck and Cover" in which you can learn all about how to be safe in an atomic bomb explosion (you know, like covering yourself with newspaper to block the flash). So now we know what I truly am--paranoid. But when I successfully escape from a train to death, I'm sure you will forgive me.

-Philip

Of Wasabi, Subway, and Defensive Songs

I don't know how many of you lovely readers, if there are any at all, know this, but I'm currently taking night classes at MIT. I know, that sounds ridiculously geeky, but they're like classes for high schoolers. And we have a ton of fun jumping out the windows (there's a ledge, don't worry), giggling over nothing in class, and giving certain people nicknames that they'll never know... (well, the never knowing part backfired a little but you know.)

But of course, everyone loves dinner. We usually go to the food court in the student center, which has BUBBLE TEA! Bubble Tea is this Asian drink with like, black squishy thingys (can't remember the name) in different flavored drinks. Basically, it's sex in a cup.

But that's not what I wanted to blog about, no matter how amazing it is. See, my friend decided to try sushi one day. Now, I guess she doesn't have sushi very often, because she didn't know what wasabi is. For those of you who don't know, wasabi is a pastey green thing and is VERY VERY VERY spicy. Not in like a pepper way. In like a "OH MY GOD WHO JUST SLAPPED ME?" way. Personally, not a huge fan. But anyway, she takes the entire chunk of wasabi they gave her, and eats it in one bite. I didn't notice what she was eating, so I was rather scared when I looked over and found her rocking back and forth in her chair, clutching her ears. Once she had chugged half a bottle of juice, she proceded to accuse me of trying to kill her for the next few... days.

There is also a Subway in the food court. My friends usually get dinner from there, and the sketchy guys who work there are always trying to talk to them, asking questions, talking to each other in their own language (we couldn't figure out what it was, beyond the fact that it wasn't Spanish) about them, etc. Then, last week, my friend was just innocently eating her sub when she picked it up off the wrapper. And what did she find? Hugely written across the center, a telephone number. Most likely, the Subway Guy's telephone number. The Subway Guy who had to be at least 20-something when she hasn't even turned 15 yet. We don't go there anymore.

I also learned The Rape Song, which has become the unofficial theme song of my history class. It goes something like this:

Stop! Don't touch me there.
This is my private square.
R-A-P-E
Get your hands away from me!

There are hand movements too (including sign language during the spelling part, just in case you know, your rapist is deaf.)

<3 Helen

Bad Things Happen to Jerks

I know, I know, you all missed me terribly. But I'm back now! As Rebecca put it, I've been too busy doing something to write—I've been at CTY, affectionately called nerd camp, taking chemistry for the last three weeks. Oh the stories I have. I was pondering where to start, but I guess the beginning will suffice—

It was first day at nerd camp and our parents had all left. We sat in the auditorium—Anita Tuvin Schlechter, say it five times fast, it's fun—our hall had gone early as per my recommendation to get the chairs that spin. The site director gets up to the stage and starts to make his annual speech.

"CTY," he says, "is like a cake. A cake has different parts. CTY has three—first, safety. Safety is on the bottom, the most important thing. After you are safe we can then learn. Then comes the last part, fun. The icing of fun. But we can't have fun unless we have safety and learning first. At CTY we don't have a lot of rules. Instead, we have an honor code. This is because you are all gifted, and whenever we say something like, no staying up past 10:30, invariably someone thinks, 'Oh, I'm so tricky, I'll go to sleep at ten, wake up at ten thirty, and spend the night partying.' No. The honor code a CTY goes like this: don't be jerk. Since some people, sadly enough, do not know what this means, the next thirty minutes will go to defining that. But in general, don't be a jerk! One of the things that makes you a jerk is harassment. Don't harass other people. There are many different flavors of harassment—it's like ice cream, ice cream of doom, though."

It went on much longer, but that's all I remember. :) More stories later!

Sachi

My Pet Snake

We kind of have a deficiency of readers and writers right now, because everybody's either doing something, so they can't write, or doing nothing, so they have nothing to tell. I fall into the second category. So, I'll have to make do with a story from my own head.

My cousin just got a dog (which by the way is really cute) and that no doubt inspired this dream I had last week:

We had this pet snake. It was about two and a half feet long, and very skinny (maybe half and inch wide), and it was red. The strangest thing was that it was like a dog. We kept it on a leash and would take it for walks. I would hold its leash and I would say "roll up" and the snake would lift its head and its tail so they touched, forming itself into a loop. I would then say "jump" and the hoop of a snake would bounce. Then it would go back to normal and I would pet its head and say "good boy!"

(Can you believe how funny and irrational we are when we're asleep?) By the way, I discovered an interesting website for all you writers out there, called WEbook (http://www.webook.com/). It's this site where you can put your writing and get feedback, and comment on other people's writing, plus the site publishes some people's stuff every so often.

So long and thanks for all the fish,
Rebecca

Absent-Minded Professors and Oscillating Circuits

I realize that I have never told you about my project. It has to do with superconductivity. The idea is to make a kind of circuit (Tunnel Diode Oscillator) which is extremely sensitive to changes, such as adding a magnetic field or dropping some atoms on it, etc. Once you have this, you put it into liquid helium and decrease the pressure to get a part of the circuit called the "meander line" to superconducting temperature. Once it superconducts, you have a very nice sine wave on the oscilloscope. Now, with a highly sensitive sine wave, we can do things to the meander line and its reactions will show up as variations on the sine wave. Apparently, this was something that the professor was working on in the 1980s but nobody has done anything with it since 1991 or so, meaning that I will be working on an unfinished old project. The effects of dropping ferromagnetic iron on the meander line has already been tested; I am going to do other things like shine electromagnetic radiation (light and its cousins) on it. It is actually rather exciting.

Yesterday, we built a part of the circuit to be connected to the one that hadn't been used since 1991. The problem was that neither of us knew that when soldering, you have to use solder. At first, I guess there was already some lead on the soldering gun, or on the wires, so we thought that the lead came from inside of the gun. After all, the word "gun" implies that it has ammunition. Who ever heard of a gun that required holding a bullet in front of it to be shot by the explosion? So we were mystified as to why nothing was coming out of the soldering gun, which was just making the wires hot and melting off the coating of the battery, when suddenly I noticed that a spool of wire said "solder" on it. Well, at that point we just started laughing.

Later, we had finished the circuit and built a copper coil, and put the apparatus all together with the professor. But something wasn't working right. So the professor started testing the resistance at different points on the circuit, muttering that something wasn't right, with us just standing, watching him. At one point, he asked us to get some liquid nitrogen for him, which we did, and brought it in. Another time he needed an oscilloscope. He put the device into the liquid nitrogen, which started bubbling vigorously upon the thermal contact, and plugged it into the oscilloscope. Still, it wasn't working. More testing of resistance. The problem was that it was getting late, and I had a family waiting for me to return for dinner. And the time it takes to walk to the subway station plus the traveling time, factoring in a bit of waiting for trains, can be as much as an hour. So I really had to do something about this. Around 5:40 my parents called me, and I told them that I was busy in the lab, and please, would they not call again. When it was closer to 6:40, I decided that I had to call them, because they would not like to wait indefinitely for me before cooking dinner. I did not know what to do. After that, I decided to tell the professor that my parents were waiting for me for dinner, at which point he said that I could go. I don't think he realized how late it was before that, because he was so caught up in trying to figure out what was wrong.

-Philip

The Strange Quantum World That We Call Home

Today, after hours of trying to stick tiny copper wires to connected films of copper and aluminum on a piece of glass with a clay-like metal called indium (and failing miserably for much of the time), we finally were finished (not that we did a very good job--we probably destroyed the films in the process). The professor, a charming little Indian man with a deep fascination with the wonders of science, came in, commented brightly that we should take a picture of the thing (when I asked if that was because it was very good or very bad, he said that he would leave me with the benefit of the doubt), and said that he wanted to show us some quantum effects at low temperatures. It was getting late, and normally I would have left to go home around then, but I was highly interested. This could be the chance of a lifetime to see such things! So Melissa and I followed the professor into another lab, where an apparatus was set up with liquid helium to get very cold. The professor showed us the set-up, and told us how we could tell the temperature of the liquid helium by looking at the barometer and using a table to see how the temperature related to the pressure. You see, liquid helium at atmospheric pressure is 4.2 degrees Kelvin. But if you reduce the pressure, the boiling point goes down, so the liquid helium gets colder. The professor opened a valve, and the pressure and temperature started going down. The liquid helium was in a glass tube, which is apparently an old-fashioned technology that is rarely used anymore. So we were some of the few people who get to see liquid helium with their own eyes. We looked in through the glass, at the vigorously boiling helium. The professor told us to keep our eyes on the surface, because at a certain point the helium would experience a quantum effect--it would become "superfluid" in which every atom somehow "knows" what every other atom is doing, and goes into the same state. And indeed, as we watched, the temperature going down, 2.9 Kelvin...2.8 Kelvin...2.7 Kelvin...at that point, the helium stopped bubbling and shaking and became completely still. A post-doc with an Irish accent came in at some point, and he and the professor began talking about the wonder of it all. "it has no friction, so if you were to spin the container as it reached the superfluid point, the helium would keep spinning forever." They continued to muse about the strangeness of it all. If you have two such particles and you changed the momentum of one of them, the momentum of the other would change, faster than the speed of light, but rather instantaneously. Why? How? Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between physics and philosophy.

Submerged in the liquid helium, was a film of aluminum and copper similar to the one that we destroyed (as the professor said jokingly). Next, we were going to see the aluminum become a superconductor, with zero resistance. We went into a little chamber with device that held a pen over graph paper and moved it along, making a line that represented the resistance in the aluminum. The temperature continued to go down, 2.1 Kelvin...2.0 Kelvin...1.9 Kelvin...and suddenly the pen veered sharply, making the line go steeply down. At 1.6 Kelvin, it reached zero, and started going straight again. "It is now in the superconducting state," said the professor. He explained the mysteries of how superconductivity works; again, this had to do with electrons that "know" what the other one is doing without feeling a force. He commented on how amazing and mysterious it must have been for the people who discovered these effects. Finally, he had one more quantum effect to show us. He said we could go home and do it tomorrow, but we decided to stay a little longer to see it. This effect had to do with tunneling through a junction with two superconductors and a thin insulator in between. At a sufficiantly low temperature, strange things happened. The resistance for the tunneling electron pairs went to zero through the insulator, so that they could tunnel back and forth continuously without anything to stop them. Well, that was the end. The professor said that he had to do some measurements, we thanked him and left. But I still can't get over how amazing, awesome (using the real meaning of the word), and eerie it was.


-Philip

My New "Job"

Yes, I know that I don't really have a job because I don't get paid. But I can pretend, can't I?

I've mastered the art of taking the T (it's actually quite simple, but I must thank Sachi for her advice nonetheless). I now take it to work every morning, and to return home every evening, so I feel like a commuting businessman. Yesterday, I attended a lab safety training lecture, along with the thirty-eight other research interns. Then, a graduate student came from each lab, we had lunch, and then they took us to the labs. Most of the people were going to work at BU labs; there was only one other person, a girl named Melissa from Long Island, who was going to work at MIT with me. The graduate student took us in his hybrid car to the MIT Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, where we were going to work. He then showed us around the labs; there were cryostats with liquid helium that can go down to 0.4 degrees Kelvin (this is impressive, if you didn't realize), strong magnets, electron beam writer, etc. Then he took us to a library and gave us articles to read about what we will be working on. Our research has to do with magnetic spin, quantum tunneling, giant magnetoresistance (GMR), and may lead to the development of better computer memory, where if your computer crashes no unsaved data is lost. Are you impressed? Well, I haven't done anything yet. The professor is absent until late on Wednesday, and we are waiting for him before we start our project. Today, I took the Green Line to Park Street, switched to the Red Line, and got out at Kendall, and as I walked through Cambridge, I heard loud sirens. I looked behind me and saw a convoy of fire trucks rushing by. I thought it would be funny if they were going to the nuclear reactor, but I saw that they didn't go that way. However, when I got to the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, I saw the fire trucks parked in front of the door, fire-fighters going in and out, police standing around the scene, and people crowded around, watching. Well, that was quite something--the first day arriving at my new job, and I see that the place is on fire. Eventually, I found Melissa, who said that she had no idea what was going on either. Soon the fire-fighters left and we entered the building. The graduate student who had shown us around the day before wasn't anywhere to be seen, and nobody else told us what to do, so we went to the library, trying to find things to read. The place was filled with textbooks about magnetism and thin films, rows of journals of applied physics, and some science-related magazines. We tried to find interesting things to read, often failed, and eventually came to the conclusion that we needed lunch. Well, there was nobody in sight, so we just left the building and had lunch at the MIT student center. Melissa went into a nearby bookstore to buy a book to read, and I remembered that I had brought a book with me. So we went back and read for a while. After some time, we wondered if anyone even knew that we were there, and if we should leave. We decided to look around for someone and at least notify him or her that we existed, and perhaps ask if we could leave. After we wandered through the halls for a while, past labs that smelled like smoke (left over from the fire perhaps?) we ran into our appointed graduate student. He made it quite clear that they didn't have anything for us to do, and that we could leave. So we did. Too bad I'm not getting paid for that.

-Philip