Elective: Week 3

We're half way there! If by there, I mean back to the UK. After the world's fastest three weeks, I am now 50% of the way through my elective. Over the course of the week, we've had the autumnal equinox and 2 days later, with characteristic Swiss efficiency, it became Autumn over night, illustrated in figure 1.

Figure 1: 8 degree drop-off between Thursday and Friday?! [1]

On Saturday morning, after a night of lightning storms, I woke up to see snow on the mountains. Global warming being what it is, I suppose this is encouraging. But similarly, it's making me think that the one (1) jumper I packed to come here might not be enough.

Figure 2: Snow-capped mountains and a bonus rainbow stub over CERN's Globe of Science and Innovation™

As far as work has been concerned, it's yet another broken promise from me if you were hoping for pictures of the experimental set-up. A million things have got in the way, as they always seem to when there's not a pressing deadline, and that's still pending. On the plus side, I've now completed the radiation protection simulations for the experiment, and moved on to actually understanding the code outlining how asymmetrically hyperpolarised nuclei should decay. Despite from an incautious assertion to Magda at the start of the elective that I can program in MATLAB, I have never previously used its graphical user interface (GUI) function, so I've been spending hours banging my head against a wall (figuratively) trying to reverse engineer a GUI which someone wrote last year. On top of this, I'm continuing to work on my clinical competency portfolio in the evenings, leading to days where I spend ~10.5 hours in the office.

On Wednesday I went to a team meeting for the wider project, let's call them the hyperpolarised MRI team, which is much larger than I had been led to believe. Jean-Noël (from last week's instalment) seems to be the team leader and also works at EPFL, meaning that the group also consists of scientists and technicians based there, and there are more aspects to it than just gamma-MRI. At least I think this is true. The meeting was (apart from my clumsy introduction of myself) held in French; I'd estimate that I understood ~70% of what everyone said. Anyway, I'm now a member of the group's Slack chat, and I can read and write French much better than I can understand it by ear, so if I've got it wrong from that meeting, I can figure it out in the coming weeks.

I had a Skype call with Magda, who was characteristically enthusiastic, and knows an intimidating amount about nuclear and atomic physics. It's intimidating, because every time I made any kind of assertion, she'd ask some kind of sensible, relevant follow-up question and I had to come up with an answer every time. Very challenging. I think I managed to hold my own, and actually learnt a lot more about the physics and the meaning behind the code I'm wrestling with. I then did my best to remember this and relay it to everyone in the hyperpolarised MRI team and, and of course instantly realised that I may not have understood it as thoroughly as I thought I did. I've got reading to do.

The whole of this week has been punctuated by frenzied BBC news updates telling me, effectively, how lucky I am not be in the UK currently. Switzerland has added the UK to its quarantine list, so any optimistic hopes I had about friends coming to visit for an impromptu weekend have been dashed by the fact that a round trip will involve 24 days' quarantine in total. On the plus side, maybe I now won't have to quarantine once I get back home, since Switzerland might end up considerably Covid-safer than the UK (cases could be falling, as the week 21st-27th September on the "nombre quotidien" graph on this info page shows. Time will of course tell, and later readers of this blog might be able to have a good laugh at how naïve I was ever to suggest such a thing).

I've now learnt that I shouldn't make any predictions about what I may or may not be doing in the coming week, merely suffice it to say that I will definitely be continuing to wrestle with software in the coming week, and maybe, just maybe, will get a chance to move/play with some magnets. In the mean time, please enjoy this excerpt from my notebook summing up my acceptance of compromise on Friday afternoon.

Figure 3: a mood