This guy walks into a bar on the top of a very tall building. He sits down, orders a huge beer, chugs it, walks over to the window, and jumps out. Five minutes later, the guy walks into the bar again, orders another huge beer, chugs it, walks over to the window, and jumps out again. Five minutes later, he re-appears and repeats the whole thing. About half an hour later, another guy at the bar stops the first guy and says, "hey, how the heck are you doing that?!" The first guy responds, "oh, it's really simple physics. When you chug the beer, it makes you all warm inside and since warm air rises, if you just hold your breath you become lighter than air and float down to the sidewalk." "WOW!" exclaims the second man, "I gotta try that!" So he orders a huge beer, chugs it, goes over to the window, jumps out, and splats on the sidewalk below. The bartender looks over to the first man and says, "Superman, you're an asshole when you're drunk."

The morning I have to wake up

I don't know how people do it, but I never wake up early unless there is a really important reason to do so. Such reasons can be a cross-atlantic flight, teaching a class, or go to the Jay Leno show. One of the nice things if being a phd is that I don't have to work as an employee: I have my completely own schedule.

Tomorrow though I will wake up at 9am for another reason: a very special Roland Garros tennis final.


Roger Federer is already, at age 24, one of the best players in history. He has won 7 grand slams so far, including the last 3, and he was to be one of the few in history to win all 4 in a row. He is truly the best overall player around. He has never won the Roland Garros though.






There is only one man that has beaten Federer this year, 3 times already. He was the same man that beat him last year and prevented him of winning the tournament. He has 59 straight wins(!) in clay courts such as Roland Garros, the best winning streak ever. He is Rafael Nadal, and he is the opponent of Federer in this final.



If you have played tennis, you might know that clay is the toughest type of court to win easily. The ground slows down the ball, and you cannot have winner balls as easily: strong shots will not necesarily win the game. And that is the reason why roland Garron is the toughest tournament in the world, because it is all clay.

Federer is the best player overall, and Nadal is the best clay player. People have been waiting for this match from the start of the tournament two weeks ago.

Let us see...

We went to a steakhouse yesterday for dinner. It turns out they offer the biggest steak in America, which weighs 76 ounces; that's about 2kg of meat! It costs $60, and only a few dare to order it. Here is the real deal though: if you finish the steak alone in less than 1 hour, then it is free! On top of that they give you a free shirt and put your photograph in the entrance to the store and also on their website. I personally didn't try it since I had eaten a bit in the morning, but maybe I will go again with an empty stomach. I wish there was such a deal in LA where we could race we did with the pasta.

And now for one of the most ridiculus things ever.

The Brookhaven National Lab where we conduct our experiments (and also write my blog these days) is one of the biggest national laboratories in the US. To get into the lab is not easy: I had to apply 1 month in advance, send all my passport and visa information, and then I went through a security background check from them before they issue me a temporary pass. The pass allowed me to enter the lab, and after a week of paperwork and training I managed to get an ID that allows me to work there. The ID also grants me entrance to the site area; it has a picture and a barcode on it, and every person crossing any of the 2 guarded entrances to the lab has to show it upon entering. Visitors cannot enter the lab; chinese students and iranian students are never granted access here; the guards carry heavy machine guns with them ( I am not kidding!); and every 2 years or so I have to renew my appointment.

Now, as you can see in the picture above, the lab facilities are inside the woods and surrounded by them. However, there is NO FENCE!

Not only that, but the road crosses only a few meters outside lab buildings. Anyone can drive by, leave his car in the road, unload the bomb from the trunk, and after 5 minutes walking you reach the buldings. Piece of cake.

And imagine that they operated a nuclear reactor here some time ago (which is now a lounge for people to hang out, isn't that cute or what?)

I couldn't resist...

From Diki's blog.

Experimental Thoughts

Nothing worked today. Everything went to hell. The experiment we tried didn't work.

In order to do our big experiment we need do a small one first. We have a plasma, which is essentially a charged gas, and we try to figure out how dense it is. To be exact, we need 10^19 electrons per cubic centimeter of space in order to be in the right way... but we don't know whether we can get it yet.

How do we create the plasma? Simple. Like the neon lights, we put a gas in a chamber and then apply a voltage across it. The electric field of the voltage is strong enough to cause electrons that were moving around the nucleus of an atom to be released and travel free. If this happens 10^19 times, we have the plasma we need. (In our case we have Hydrogen gas instead of neon or xenon, and we apply 20,000 Volts instead of 220, because we need so many electrons free!)

The big question that we have been dealing with the last few months is: how do we measure how many electrons we have? How do we measure the plasma density?

The latest thing we tried was an interferometer. We take a laser and split it in two beams. The first beam travels through the air, the second beam travels equal distance through the plasma. Then we add the beams at the end. If the times they travelled are exactly equal, a certain pattern emerges when you sum the beams; if they are not, another certain pattern emerges.

Light slows down when it travels through a medium. The same thing happens with plasma: when the laser beam goes through, it slows down by an amount that depends on the density of the plasma. The more electrons in the way of the beam, the more it slows down, and hence it produces a different pattern. So by looking at the pattern we can trackback and calculate how many electrons the laser found on its way, and hence find the density.

Well, nothing worked. For one thing, the laser pattern that emerges is very sensitive to the distance travelled. A few nm of difference (less than a human hair!) will create its own patterns, so we cannot distinguish if teh pattern we see is due to the plasma or due to someone walking by, closing a door, or flushing the toilet! All kinds of vibrations are around and they affect the measurement.

Second, when you apply 20,000 volts, well, it is very strong. If there is air, it may cause a spark (that's why we have the whole thing inside vacuum). But there are always particles of air around, and instead of the voltage reaching the plasma it creates currents on its way there and is gone before it ever reaches it!

Tomorrow we will try it again, more carefully and more cleanly. We will see...