from the belly of the beast

I'm writing from inside the synchrotron (www.esrf.fr). A synchrotron is a ring of about 200 meters in diameter made of magnets. Electron bunches travel around the ring. Every time they meet a magnet they turn. Electrons don't like to turn, they would rather keep on going straight, so every time they meet a magnet they lose energy, this energy is under the form of x-rays for the most part. The x-rays are collected by mirrors into beams that come out tangentially from the ring, we use the x-ray beams to do experiments, voila !

To be in here it is a bit eerie, I kinda like it, surrounded by lots of electronics, machines covered with aluminum foil (keeps the electric noise down it seems), vacuum pumps, cables everywhere, liquid nitrogen. The soft hum of the ventilators pads your hearing and helps to concentrate, like a sensory deprivation tank. Along those lines, there are no windows on the experimental floor, there is a constant amout of light, one easily loses the sense of time, makes it easier to work 24 hours a day (the machine never stops).

Now in the era of the internet there are lots of ways to keep amused while we wait for the data to accumulate enough to surface above noise, or for the nanometer long fluorescently labled DNA fragments to work their way through the mesh of the gel to the laser, where we can detect them. back in my student days there was no internet, imagine that, what did we do all night ? Sometimes we would go out and hang out with the deer (we were on Long Island) and look at the stars (http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/) not too much light pollution in the middle of nowhere.