Flashback to undergrad lab
I took this photo to document the setup that I was using while I was working on my senior project in college. It was a little table-top particle physics project, using a detector (just off camera to the right) not built by me. I set up the data acquisition chain in the lab and wrote some software to run it. (Side note: that was implemented in LabView, which I haven’t used since. LabView is an interesting concept that lets you write software graphically, instead of in a traditional programming language. I remember waking up that semester in the middle of trippy dreams involving that programming language.)
Most of the electronics boards here were, I think, basically spare parts that my advisor (the late Prof Ulrich Becker) had brought back from CERN. I think some of it was stuff that had gone bad and thus been tossed. He would take the boards to his lab bench and figure out which solder joint had failed or whatever and fix it. (It may have also just been surplus.)
(For the curious, the bottom rack is a CAMAC crate and the rack above it is a NIM crate.)
The most interesting artifact here is the module on the very top, which isn’t connected to anything in this photo but worked just fine and was used for manual testing. It was a simple pulse counter, old enough that the display used Nixie tubes ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXBK__h6MY0 ). Unfortunately I do not have a picture of it powered on. Those Nixie tubes were so cool. The hand lettering in orange paint says “KF GRP”. This was a reference to the Kendall-Friedman Group. Henry Kendall and Jerry Friedman were the MIT part of the MIT-SLAC deep inelastic scattering experiments that discovered the quark structure of the proton in the late 60s and early 70s. Kendall, Friedman, and Richard Taylor won the Nobel Prize for this in 1990. So I always assumed that this was surplus left over from that era, although that is an assumption.
Henry Kendall assisted as an instructor for a small lab component of a class I had as a freshman in the fall of 1998. (Physics majors don’t take a “real” lab class until junior year, but this was some very light introduction to the lab environment that was folded into another class.) I distinctly remember him gently scolding me for showing too many significant digits in my numerical results. It’s a lesson I never forgot! Only a month or two later, he tragically died in a diving accident in Florida. I saw Friedman give a lecture at MIT at some point. I don’t recall if I ever encountered Taylor when I was at SLAC.
This lab was in Building 44 — the MIT Cyclotron building, which has since been demolished. I must have an old film picture of the cyclotron somewhere. I should see if I can find one. (The cyclotron dated to about 1940 but I believe the building was newer [ physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.3058412 ].)
Flashback to undergrad lab
I took this photo to document the setup that I was using while I was working on my senior project in college. It was a little table-top particle physics project, using a detector (just off camera to the right) not built by me. I set up the data acquisition chain in the lab and wrote some software to run it. (Side note: that was implemented in LabView, which I haven’t used since. LabView is an interesting concept that lets you write software graphically, instead of in a traditional programming language. I remember waking up that semester in the middle of trippy dreams involving that programming language.)
Most of the electronics boards here were, I think, basically spare parts that my advisor (the late Prof Ulrich Becker) had brought back from CERN. I think some of it was stuff that had gone bad and thus been tossed. He would take the boards to his lab bench and figure out which solder joint had failed or whatever and fix it. (It may have also just been surplus.)
(For the curious, the bottom rack is a CAMAC crate and the rack above it is a NIM crate.)
The most interesting artifact here is the module on the very top, which isn’t connected to anything in this photo but worked just fine and was used for manual testing. It was a simple pulse counter, old enough that the display used Nixie tubes ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXBK__h6MY0 ). Unfortunately I do not have a picture of it powered on. Those Nixie tubes were so cool. The hand lettering in orange paint says “KF GRP”. This was a reference to the Kendall-Friedman Group. Henry Kendall and Jerry Friedman were the MIT part of the MIT-SLAC deep inelastic scattering experiments that discovered the quark structure of the proton in the late 60s and early 70s. Kendall, Friedman, and Richard Taylor won the Nobel Prize for this in 1990. So I always assumed that this was surplus left over from that era, although that is an assumption.
Henry Kendall assisted as an instructor for a small lab component of a class I had as a freshman in the fall of 1998. (Physics majors don’t take a “real” lab class until junior year, but this was some very light introduction to the lab environment that was folded into another class.) I distinctly remember him gently scolding me for showing too many significant digits in my numerical results. It’s a lesson I never forgot! Only a month or two later, he tragically died in a diving accident in Florida. I saw Friedman give a lecture at MIT at some point. I don’t recall if I ever encountered Taylor when I was at SLAC.
This lab was in Building 44 — the MIT Cyclotron building, which has since been demolished. I must have an old film picture of the cyclotron somewhere. I should see if I can find one. (The cyclotron dated to about 1940 but I believe the building was newer [ physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.3058412 ].)