Geektronics: August 2004 Archives

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.