mechanophilia
It's like sitting at the control deck of a starship; in front of you floats a steel plate, roughly a metre squared, suspended perfectly at the horizontal by pneumatic cylinders driven by a compressor in the next room; to the right, a pair of flat panel displays offer up a digital control panel of mind numbing complexity, a small box covered in green-glowing buttons dismisses its size by looking very important, and twin multi-gigahertz computers controlled via bluetooth add to the technoarray with their steady hum and sheer bulk; to the left, a squat panel of eight illuminated switches flanks a rack of heavy black steel that carries four cylinders; two Helium-Neon lasers, each about a foot and a half long and two inches in diameter, a single diode laser nestled beneath them, and to their right, an argon laser, five full inches in cross-section and mounted by a fuck-off-huge cooling fan.
And in the middle, sat square on the steel plate, and connected to the flanking equipment by a quarrel of fibre optic cabling and wire is the photomultiplier, the centre of this mechanical universe; behold, the confocal microscope, all £190 000 of it. And I am taking it for a test drive.
I like that I can be left to assess $350 000 worth of scientific wizardry all on my own. Put me behind the wheel of a car worth three hundred and fifty times less, and I'd feel far more concerned about doing something wrong -- perhaps because doing something wrong in a car is more likely to involve my neck -- but there are no cars here; on my planet, the poofs are armed with lasers.
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Confocal microscopes are fantastic, aren't they? Thanks for letting me experience the thrill vicariously ;)
Superb description, but I for one am disappointed by the lack of visual aids. ;) How often does one get to see a confocal thingamajig?
All this science stuff is way above my head. Social scientist here :)
But who cares, I'm back tomorrow (Sat 28). Yay yay yay. I want ice cream :)
I could only take that line seriously coming from another scientist, Mark, so it's just as well that you're 100 % as thrilled as you suggest :-D Incidentally, it's a new line produced by Olympus, and is the first of its kind in the country, which is novel.
K2, I'll try to take a picture if ever I have too much time on my hands, but showing you what you can see through the microscope is far easier, and prettier too, so I might post one of those.
! ! ! Me too ! ! ! Have a safe journey :)
Ahem. Still waiting for those pictures, Allie.
Of course, I'm only posting this so I can be legit 1000 -- symmetry an' that -- but even so, we want pics. Put 'em up!