my boobs are a menace to science

I'm taking a class on Transmission electron microscopy this quarter. It's kind of like Scanning electron microscopy, except that instead of shooting electrons at a sample and measuring the ones that bounce off, we make a sample real thin and the electrons tunnel, and then we measure them. It's actually fancier than it sounds; electron tunneling is a quantum effect, in fact its usually known as quantum tunnelling. You see, we have a lot of tools and methods to model the atom and describe the way these particles all buzz around each other, but when it comes to actually knowing what it does we are completely in the dark. One of the methods we use for explaining the behavior of these particles is with statistical methods. We model the orbits of the electrons by giving probabilities that it be in any particular place at a given time. Obviously some locations are more probable than others. When we model the path of an electron as we shoot it at a solid boundary, the closer we get to the boundary, the probability that the electron will be found there drops. However, the nature of probability functions is that they are continuous; you can't just stick a boundary and say it can't be located on the other side. Matter isn't really solid, mostly made of empty space, so what makes up that border? Not much. Anyway, you make the sample thin enough and the probability says it will go all the way through to the other side. I say it just found a way in all that empty space, but the rules of quantum tunneling say it will never actually be found inside the matter, just on the one side and coming out the other. So anyway, now we're learning the TEM and its a bit more delicate than the SEM. Apparently. I wasn't there for the first class, I was judging the High School science fair (the little geniuses were so cute!) so I missed the announcements about 'absolutely don't do this'. This model is a bit older and so it has a compartment where you could place film for pictures. This compartment by necessity is located right in front under the main column of the microscope, right where you face the machine. As with all of the internal mechanism of the scope, it is under high vacuum, something of the order of 10 E -9. Vacuums of this level often take time to reach, minutes to hours. Again, this is an older machine so it takes more like hours. I bumped the lever to open the chamber with my boobs. Class was over at that point.