data speeds

there are many unsolved mysteries surrounding the walls of the jmu physcis lounge; from the hidden treasures stashed atop the ceiling, to the stale graffiti etched on the walls; some even claim the origins of the mischievous phys-chem clicking noises arose within the lounge itself; but perhaps the strangest and most pressing mystery of them all... is the inability for wifi to penetrate those steely walls.  slow data speeds have plagued this historic room for eons.  only now have we had the gall to document its sluggish crawl.

figure 001:  a map of the entire jmu physics department.  do you know what will happen if you tap it with a gnarled stick and mutter the words "mischief managed" ... nothing.

as it turns out a tini netbook running windows 7 starter made to load speedtest.net over and over again is not a happy netbook.  but non-the-less, after many firefox crashes, the data was collected and is presented below in units of megabits per second.

the most distressing area was the top left hallway, next to the lecture hall.  this is a common meeting place for students, and it is important for us to awkwardly check our email while waiting to be let into the room.  slow data speeds can be a real problem in this area.

the hallway right outside the physics lounge seemed consistent during trail one and two, but then on the last run it spiked to an awesome 41 megabits/sec!  this fluctuation also occurred outside dr. whisnant's office; the first and third trials saw low data speeds, but the second spiked up to a value of 32.  i blame whisnant.

conclusion?  we need a router in the physics lounge.  only then can the mystery of the sluggish data speed be vanquished, and a new era of successful youtube streaming can commence.
-josh mitri

hydrogen's first picture

the hydrogen atom is shy; it doesnt like to have its picture taken; but researchers in the netherlands has broken hydrogen out of its bubble, so to speak.  they took the first ever picture of hydrogen's electron cloud.  these clouds have been imaged before; from nitrogen molecules [2] to Xe atoms [3], the electron cloud has had no escape from the leer of the camera.  what sets this study apart is the method of detection. 

they isolate a hydrogen atom; shoot it with a 243 nm pulsed laser to excite the atom; shoot it 'fourier-limited tunable' 365 nm laser to release the electrons; these electrons are now called photoelectrons; they are accelerated by a 808 V/cm electric field (perpendicular to the detector); they move across an einzel lens that magnifies it by one order of magnitude; they stick onto a phosphor screen with microchannel plates; where it is recorded using a CCD camera. [1]

this detection method accurately depicts the distribution of electrons around the hydrogen atom.  as it turns out, the electron mapping correlates well with the schrodinger's equation for the system, thus providing (the first?) experimental evidence for the wave function of hydrogen.  the concept for this experiment has been in the literature for 30 years [4]; everything from the use of ionized hydrogen to the position of the detector perpendicular to the electric field was proposed long before the experiments where conducted.  

this just goes to show that we need more people willing to do these impotent experiments, so we can get things done in a timely fashion.  of course no blame is to be made to the 9 people conducting this experiment, they did an excellent job and jolly good for them but in the future we should strive to conduct experiments right after the theoretical predictions are made public.  that is the way forward for science, and that is the right way to detect electron clouds.
-josh mitri

[1] http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v110/i21/e213001

[2] http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041213/full/news041213-7.html

[3] http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v88/i13/e133001

[4] http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-4075/23/21/015/