Space Giants and All

Disappointment again..I drove to Chicago on Friday with two colleagues to use the synchrotron up there at the Argonne National Laboratory, sounds impressive, doesn't it;) Which is just a giant particle accelerator, umm, well lets see, a giant machine that creates really strong x-rays. For you non-scientists, what it's doing is taking a gaseous element (think back to those days in chem) and spinning them around in a tube that is a mile long. Literally, that's all they do is spin the suckers as fast as they can until the electrons of the element jump orbitals. Then as the electron moves back to its original orbital, it gives off X-rays.

Think of it as the sun is an element, and the earth is an electron and some big giant space beast picks up the sun and flings it in a circle really hard around the galaxy, so hard in fact, that the earth moves up to where, say, Jupiter is. Then the space giant wanders off and the sun is able to slow down a bit, which allows the earth to move back to where it started, only as the earth moves back, it spews off half the population of the earth, just for fun.

Well, we use those x-rays in experiments, to diffract protein crystals (I think I have a picture of them in a former blog). Just like visible light diffracts into a rainbow when it hits a prism. Anyway, we're able to create a picture of a protein (that may be important in cancer or some other disease) from that diffraction.

So, the point of this lesson is, my crystals didn't diffract. Back to square one. So I drove for 16hrs, wasted a perfectly good Saturday, and have nothing to show for it. Ahh, the pleasures of science. It'd be more fun to be a big giant space beast.