a post from funnydad
hey, i went to NIST the other day. ever heard of it? national institute for standards and technology. it's where the atomic clock is based. and it's here in boulder. (as is NOAA - national something of atmospheric research.) anyway, someone who works with me has a husband who's a scientist there. took us on a tour just for fun. pretty cool, the shit they're doing. didn't even understand most of it, even after he explained, but still cool. all these lasers and optics and measurement shit. stuff that hasn't been done before. (working on a new way of measuring laser light that might in the end be the new system for measuring time, replace the atomic clock). one machine - a scanner they were trying to develop that detects weapons made of ceramic, undetectable by conventional metal detectors, for use in airports, etc - was essentially a big camera that looked like a hub cab. that hub cap camera spun around on wheels. i noticed the wheels were "Rollerblade" wheels. when i asked the guy why, he said: well, a lot of this stuff doesn't exist yet, so we can't just order it from some manufacturer, we've got to build it from what's available.
showed us how the new atomic clock works. you've got lasers hitting an atom from six or so symmetrical directions. when that happens, the atom gets suspended in place. it basically stops moving. absolute zero (or the statistical equivalent, he called it something like marginal kelvin). then they measure how that atom floats up and down. and that's time.
actually, he said, it was that advancement - coming up with the idea of hitting all atom with lasers from all sides (he showed us the original, outdated atomic clock, was basically a metal tube, at least from the outside) that somehow lead to the development of GPS. i asked him how, but honestly, the explanation didn't make much sense to me. basically, the old atomic clock was super precise - something like one second was lost in thirty thousand years - but this one was so much more precise (one second in a million years, or something) that that advancement let them do something else that led to GPS. how? dunno, something about triangulation. shit was cool, though.
what was so interesting about it was that all this future techno advanced shit was in a completely antiquated setting - straight out of the 1950s. (it's the government. that's what you get.) the place had been built in Ike's day, and apart from the lasers and sensors themselves, hadn't been touched since then. the hallways, the equipment, everything - even the gas mask-type emergency equipment on the wall (a lot of kill-you-in-an-instant gases in use there) looked like something straight out of a 50s documentary. guy said they got 12 million in govt funding, and about 6 mill in private grants. that's it. my company, covidien, will spend that much on r&d for one project they're considering. that's insane.
but it's how much our government spends on developing our future as a nation. meantime, china and whatever other countries are pouring money into govt sponsored research.
and the important thing, of course, is that what NIST is doing isn't for private usage. whatever they do has to be about "standards" - the standards for measurement (of lasers, of whatever). so they basically come up with ideas that can't be patented. that will be the system for all industry moving forward. the reason the US is dominant in the fiber optics biz, for example, is that NIST developed the standard for measurement that all companies (across the globe) now use. If that had been developed by, say, Germany, there'd be a lot more dominant German phone companies (or course, by now, phone companies are out of date, because everything is wireless).
for instance, this guy was working on a way to make lasers essentially a lot more efficient. light bulbs are staggeringly inefficient. but so are lasers, it turns out. and lasers are used by nearly every manufacturer these days. so, i didn't really get the details - or, shit, let's face it, i didn't even get the overview - but he's working on some new way of converting energy into laser light. (was that it?) or rather, a lot of people are working on that - he's working on developing the measurement standard for it (whatever exactly that means). so, if they're able to do it, it could make industrial application of lasers a great deal more efficient. that's means serious money. and yet, they're working out of a building that looks like the basement of appalachia community college - with about as much resources. with some of the best minds in the game, down there with those 1950s gas masks on the walls.
nice moment: in one room we went into, cordoned off in a separate area, behind a door with large red warning light above it, filled mostly with a giant laser machine wrapped almost entirely in Target brand aluminum foil (the box was sitting on a counter, as if the application had been recent), the guy nonchalantly said to us - when you hear the alarms, that's when you run.
fun trip. wish i remembered more what he was talking about. one of those things where you thought you half understood what he was saying while he talked, then later realized how little really stuck.
that's my news. job's fine. busy. a little (perhaps more than little) stressed. but it'll be ok. i hope. think i'd like to take up rock climbing. what the hell - why not.
showed us how the new atomic clock works. you've got lasers hitting an atom from six or so symmetrical directions. when that happens, the atom gets suspended in place. it basically stops moving. absolute zero (or the statistical equivalent, he called it something like marginal kelvin). then they measure how that atom floats up and down. and that's time.
actually, he said, it was that advancement - coming up with the idea of hitting all atom with lasers from all sides (he showed us the original, outdated atomic clock, was basically a metal tube, at least from the outside) that somehow lead to the development of GPS. i asked him how, but honestly, the explanation didn't make much sense to me. basically, the old atomic clock was super precise - something like one second was lost in thirty thousand years - but this one was so much more precise (one second in a million years, or something) that that advancement let them do something else that led to GPS. how? dunno, something about triangulation. shit was cool, though.
what was so interesting about it was that all this future techno advanced shit was in a completely antiquated setting - straight out of the 1950s. (it's the government. that's what you get.) the place had been built in Ike's day, and apart from the lasers and sensors themselves, hadn't been touched since then. the hallways, the equipment, everything - even the gas mask-type emergency equipment on the wall (a lot of kill-you-in-an-instant gases in use there) looked like something straight out of a 50s documentary. guy said they got 12 million in govt funding, and about 6 mill in private grants. that's it. my company, covidien, will spend that much on r&d for one project they're considering. that's insane.
but it's how much our government spends on developing our future as a nation. meantime, china and whatever other countries are pouring money into govt sponsored research.
and the important thing, of course, is that what NIST is doing isn't for private usage. whatever they do has to be about "standards" - the standards for measurement (of lasers, of whatever). so they basically come up with ideas that can't be patented. that will be the system for all industry moving forward. the reason the US is dominant in the fiber optics biz, for example, is that NIST developed the standard for measurement that all companies (across the globe) now use. If that had been developed by, say, Germany, there'd be a lot more dominant German phone companies (or course, by now, phone companies are out of date, because everything is wireless).
for instance, this guy was working on a way to make lasers essentially a lot more efficient. light bulbs are staggeringly inefficient. but so are lasers, it turns out. and lasers are used by nearly every manufacturer these days. so, i didn't really get the details - or, shit, let's face it, i didn't even get the overview - but he's working on some new way of converting energy into laser light. (was that it?) or rather, a lot of people are working on that - he's working on developing the measurement standard for it (whatever exactly that means). so, if they're able to do it, it could make industrial application of lasers a great deal more efficient. that's means serious money. and yet, they're working out of a building that looks like the basement of appalachia community college - with about as much resources. with some of the best minds in the game, down there with those 1950s gas masks on the walls.
nice moment: in one room we went into, cordoned off in a separate area, behind a door with large red warning light above it, filled mostly with a giant laser machine wrapped almost entirely in Target brand aluminum foil (the box was sitting on a counter, as if the application had been recent), the guy nonchalantly said to us - when you hear the alarms, that's when you run.
fun trip. wish i remembered more what he was talking about. one of those things where you thought you half understood what he was saying while he talked, then later realized how little really stuck.
that's my news. job's fine. busy. a little (perhaps more than little) stressed. but it'll be ok. i hope. think i'd like to take up rock climbing. what the hell - why not.
Comments