Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Being Right Rules
I am trying to join a research group on Nano Crystallography (dont' ask), and the entrance requirement is rather strange. In order to gain entry you must read a speech by Ernst Ruska (Germans again!), given when he accepted the Nobel Prize for physics for inventing the first electron microscope, which was really just a modified cathode ray oscilliscope. The lecture, it is suspected, was written by hand by Mr. Ruska and then scanned and typed by some Nobel-related admin. This led to 2 apparently very prominent mistakes in the speech which was given uncorrected. So I have to find the two errors. I had found one of the errors and I searched and searched for the second. I finally found one which was a computational mistake regarding the resolution limit for said electron microscopes at diferrent voltages. I'm telling you what, I tried the numbers every which way but backwards and could not get the results he claimed. I was sure this was the error and presented it to my Professor, who really is a nice German guy. He informed me this was not it, and that those numbers were just estimates. I countered that it is not that the estimations are off from the measured values, but that the computations used to get the estimates are off, and that was the last I heard of it. That was about 3 weeks ago. Today Prof. Moeck told me I WAS RIGHT! (using the abbe equation it is not possible to achieve resolution of 2.2 Angstroms using electrons at 75 kV). I asked if that was enough to get me into the group, he said almost. COME ON!!!! That fucking rules, I don't care who you are.
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