Catatonic

I would have expected vacuuming the cat to turn the feline into a frenetic fuzzball.

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One More Thing . . .

The other thing that struck me about bait-and-switch was this

I gravitated toward a scientific life with fantasies of sci-fi movies running through my head, with large machines emitting lightning at the flip of a huge Frankenstein-type switch, or several people poring over softly-glowing computer screens as an experiment produces fantastic data in real-time, and great discoveries are made. I thought this kind of thing actually happened even as I started grad school (even if I had never seen it in my various research summers…)

It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen (depending on your definition of “great”). Back in my first postdoc, at TRIUMF, we trapped radioactive potassium atoms for nuclear-decay tests of the standard model. Or, more precisely, we planned to do this, since the research had progressed only to the point where stable potassium had been trapped when I started working there. Not too long after my arrival we were scheduled for a few stretches of beam time, with an appropriate target to produce the radioactive isotopes we were trying to trap.

Since these were radioactive isotopes, the exact frequency for trapping them was unknown, though the presence of stable isotopes meant (in principle) that the isotope shift could be calculated to some degree of accuracy and narrow down the range of frequencies for the trapping and repump interactions. Since the linewidth of the transition is somewhere around 5 MHz, and you should be able to see a trap with a laser detuning of somewhere between a half a linewidth and several linewidths to the red of resonance, we set up to scan in discrete steps of several MHz, pausing at each step to look for fluorescence at the center of the trapping region — literally looking: we integrated the output from a CCD camera and displayed it on a computer screen, along with a graph of the total fluorescence.
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