Rochester III

University of Rochester has the largest laser in the world, and by 'largest' they're referring primarily to it being the most powerful but it's got to be competitive on the basis of physical size as well. An initial infrared pulse propages through the laser medium, repeatedly amplified and split. By the end of the arrangement, 60 beams simultaneously converge on a 1 mm pellet of tritium and deuterium ice inside a small plastic bubble. The purpose is to induce thermonuclear fusion.

This is used to experimentally reproduce the conditions inside stars, bringing "laboratory astrophysics" from an oxymoron to a major area of research. The other big point is of course fusion for power production. Fusion produces enough energy to cover the cost required to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then to sort the hydrogen into its isotopes, and also to power the laser beams that ignite the fusion reaction. It's not too much of a stretch to say that you burn seawater to produce helium and oxygen and huge amounts of energy.

I think Buckminster Fuller would be proud. He was the canonical futurist, and insisted that technology could be used to provide for the needs of all people on earth. Strictly speaking, fusion is not a renewable energy source; at first glance, burning water (a precious substance necessary for life) seems full of folly. But as 1 km^3 of water contains as much energy as all the known oil in the world, it doesn't seem there's much cause for worry. Fusion seems to be the only 'clean' energy source, although one might do well to not prognosticate with excessive optimism — nuclear fission was promised to produce energy 'too cheap to meter,' but instead it has been one of the most costly endeavors ever undertaken.

But it seems Fusion would be clean, and, suprisingly, at center of it (in a quite literal way), is technology invented and championed by Buckminster Fuller. It's necessary to implode the fusion fuel with utmost uniformity, blasting it evenly from as many angles as possible. It turns out that the geometric arrangements permitting this are exactly the configurations we know as 'geodesic domes,' with the beams entering from each vertex.

It gets better. The tritium-deuterium fuel must be held in place during the experimental set-up. Unfortunately almost any material will become excessively brittle at the super-cold temperatures required, approximately 18 Kelvin. But a substance has been found, and it's used to fix the fusion fuel into position at the center of this 60-vertex buckyball: the silk from a spider.

One of the lab directions jokingly cites this as evidence that Darwin was wrong. "Why would a Spider need silk that would function on Pluto?"

Rochester IV

Our lectures today started with an enumeration of the various prizes that Rochester physicists have been awarded. It was meant to be impressive, but to me it seemed almost like damning with faint praise. Afterwards, Mattias turned to me and asked, ``Have you heard of any of those prizes?"

Except for the two nobel prizes (one to Steve Chu, who did his B.S. in Math and Physics at U of R, and one to the japanese dude who started KamiokaNDE), I had never heard of them before.

We had lectures from professors in each of the major subfields at a turbo pace today. The talks all went over and there was little time to get a word in edgewise. In a sense it was silly, because I already know about the standard model in a qualitative way, and I was much more interested in mundane details: "Do grad students get desks?" (yes) "Is there a machine shop?" (yes, but there's only one machinist) "How long will it take to graduate?" (5-6 years) "Does anyone take advantage of the exchange program with Cornell?" ("I've never heard of it.") "Do the frosh live mostly on campus?" (90% of them do) I've been feeling quite sick, so of course my exuberance has been dampened by the desire to stay cozily drugged and unconscious in bed. For almost the entirety of yesterday and today we were inside the physics building, which is sort of a dull place. The talks were in the basement.

Finally we got a long-awaited campus tour, got to go outside and bound about. The other students snickered by the obvious amusement the two Californians found in the snow. The tour revealed the incredible smallness of the campus.. This is really a small school! The buildings are heated to tropical temperatures to compensate for the sub-freezing temperature outside. I don't understand this over-compensation. Californians are content to put on a pullover indoors, but denizens of arctic climates insist on heating their buildings to tank-top temperatures.

The laser lab is awesome, but I'm not all that sure what sort of work one would be doing there. It is, like CERN, primarily an Engineering effort, in terms of the domain of the bulk of the labor.

We had a brief tour of student housing. All the buildings are brick, and the student housing is good but not particularly charming in any way. There are, for example, nothing like co-ops.

In the evening we gathered one last time to schmooze with the profs. They are all very eager to convince us to come to Rochester, and several remembered bits from our applications ("you're the computer guy" or "and you've been running all over the globe"). But I wasn't really feeling up to too much more schmoozing, so I talked with Mattias for most of the time. (It's amazing how much gossip can develop from one summer in Geneva. We also swapped travel tales.. he's been through Africa, Uzbekistan, all over the place.)

In a sense I think all the propective students are looking at each other for an evaluation of Rochester. The first to decide may set a trend. I haven't reached a conclusion myself. I think the department here is good, but I suppose my visit here has given me a better idea of the realities of graduate school, and it's a little frightening. Although I would like a change of environment, my hopes are ever more on the UC Berkeley AST group, although I fear that that graduate group has too many bigwigs and too few young advisors with an interest in students (something that is not lacking here).