Elective: Week 4

 For all the dedicated subscribers, I am terribly sorry that this blog entry is a week late. There are two reasons for this:

1) I was having a lovely weekend in Zurich last weekend, and I usually write this blog on weekends

2) I got kicked out of my flat and my colleague had covid symptoms so I ended up homeless and unable to move in anywhere and, no offense to this blog and its 23 readers (to date), my mind was elsewhere.

Isn't it funny how things just end up piling up together like this, when it rains it pours, etc. So anyway. Let's go in chronological order, starting from the actual "work" work I did in my 4th week. 

The basis of The Project is a paper from 1985* by Calaprice et al., in which someone much cleverer than myself used mathematical deduction and experimental observation to conclude that gamma-emitting nuclei will not just spew out gamma ray photons in all directions, willy-nilly. They will in fact be emitted in complex (and sometimes aesthetically pleasing) directions described by Legendre polynomials, a bit of maths I had not touched since my second year of undergrad about, five years ago (!). Calaprice et al. then managed to realise this prediciton in some actual Xenon-133m. The dream. Through my limited knowledge of atomic and thermal physics, I managed to populate some atomic sublevels in some code which another MSc student on The Project wrote, to reproduce mathematically something which someone did 35 years ago (see figure 1). Success, in the most specific, and limited sense of the word.

Figure 1: Success. This is it, lads. This is what we're all here for.

This took a surprisingly long time, and I needed to verify it with someone with a PhD in atomic physics before I could really feel sure of the result. So it may just look like a naïve line drawing of a peanut, but I promise it's one of the most informed and insightful plots I've made, to date. 

Alongside this, I was also planning, and presenting at, the East of England Medical Physics and Clinical Engineering Regional Scientific Meeting (EoEMPCERSM, not its actual acronym but since I was a third of the planning committee, who else can authoritatively say it isn't?) For this, I was presenting my MSc project on radium-223 contamination monitoring, over Zoom. This all went very well, with the slight drawback that I hadn't worked on it since I got out to Switzerland, so was a little rusty on the details. And also the fact that earlier that morning, some people entered my flat demanding to know who I was, how I got there, and that I leave as soon as possible. 

It turned out that I was not supposed to be staying in the flat where I'd been in for a few days, but despite this I was still the responsibility of the people who managed it. Or something like that. It was all rather vague, but the upshot was that I was, in a civil legal sense, Not Welcome. This was Friday morning. I was going to Zurich to visit a friend called Kenji that weekend, so I packed up all my worldly possessions in the BA hand-luggage-approved bags I had for them and got everything out of the flat over the course of the day. 

Me and all my stuff, in a room where I wasn't meant to be

The weekend in Zurich was lovely and I met Kenji's partner and tiny son Miles who is great. I managed to mostly take my mind off things for those two days, seeing Zurich's lake and sights, as well as being reminded of its extreme costliness (more so than Geneva!?). I also, after sharing my story, managed to get a free shot at a bar from a bartender "from one couch surfer to another". I felt like a bit of a fraud since she had obviously been in the trade longer, and harder, than I had, but nonetheless it was nice to remember I wasn't alone. 

Just having a really nice time

Anyway this blog entry is taking rather longer to write than usual, so I'll leave it as a two-parter to be resolved in Week 5's edition.

*apologies about the inaccessibility of this article, sadly that's the environment we're living in, scientifically, these days. At time of writing, not even the OpenAthens link on this page works. Sort it out, @APSphysics