endlercollector
- #1
My husband is an experimental nuclear physicist. Really. It's a party conversation killer. Whenever someone does ask him what he does, and he tells them, they kind of freeze up, talk about how they didn't understand anything when they took physics. Or else, they turn out to be weird groupies who have no idea what he does but think he must be cool somehow in a really nerdy way.
Well, to be honest, I don't really know what he does. I just know it has to do with energy and not bombs, but radiation is involved, and he has to wear a badge to get into his lab. He jokes that the badge has some kind of protective power.
So I'm surrounded by physicists. Most of our friends are physicists. One couple (both physicists) have a strange yet brilliant son who decided to load MS-DOS onto a modern Mac. He figured out a 200-step procedure to do it when he was 11. Yet if he sees something unexpected on the ground, he panics and can't think of how to get around it for 20 minutes. Yes, really.
Me? I nearly failed algebra because I couldn't stay awake. I failed the math test that was required to get into physics in high school, so I never took it. But that never got in the way of my dealing with everyday life. My husband, on the other hand, is continuously thinking about the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang. One day, he was supposed to be helping me put stuff away in the kitchen. He held up a blender with a puzzled look on his face and asked, "What's the theory behind this?" "There's no theory," I retorted. "You plug it in and it works. And it goes in the cabinet behind you."
My life *is* the Big Bang Theory, but in slow motion, beyond g-e-o-l-o-g-i-c time. We get a funny story about once a year, and usually, I'm so annoyed that I can't laugh about if for at least six months even though I tell it to random strangers in the checkout line in the supermarket. But they can't understand the question of physicists and fish tanks if they don't like fish, which is why I need to post about it here.
A couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to act on my vague idea that if I could find the right connector, I could hook up a hose to some extra tubing and then to my siphon, allowing me to water a dry patch of flowers. But when I went outside, I discovered that my husband had connected two really long hoses together so tightly that I couldn't separate them. I asked him to do it for me and put the end of the first one into the flower bed, and he did. No problem. I was running around doing other chores and occasionally checking in to make sure that the one uneducable emerald cory hadn't gotten sucked up again, when I suddenly realized that 2 hours (!) had passed, and the water had gone down less than an inch. When I complained to my husband about it, he said the problem was that there was too much air in the hose. Now, we live on a slope, and even I know how to use a self-starting siphon and that water seeks its lowest level. So I went outside and discovered that instead of disconnecting the 2 hoses, he had wrapped 200 feet around back up the slope and then into the flowers. Yes, there's a theory of gravity, but then there's also the reality of gravity. I let him have it.
And yet he works on a particle accelerator? Sigh.
Well, to be honest, I don't really know what he does. I just know it has to do with energy and not bombs, but radiation is involved, and he has to wear a badge to get into his lab. He jokes that the badge has some kind of protective power.
So I'm surrounded by physicists. Most of our friends are physicists. One couple (both physicists) have a strange yet brilliant son who decided to load MS-DOS onto a modern Mac. He figured out a 200-step procedure to do it when he was 11. Yet if he sees something unexpected on the ground, he panics and can't think of how to get around it for 20 minutes. Yes, really.
Me? I nearly failed algebra because I couldn't stay awake. I failed the math test that was required to get into physics in high school, so I never took it. But that never got in the way of my dealing with everyday life. My husband, on the other hand, is continuously thinking about the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang. One day, he was supposed to be helping me put stuff away in the kitchen. He held up a blender with a puzzled look on his face and asked, "What's the theory behind this?" "There's no theory," I retorted. "You plug it in and it works. And it goes in the cabinet behind you."
My life *is* the Big Bang Theory, but in slow motion, beyond g-e-o-l-o-g-i-c time. We get a funny story about once a year, and usually, I'm so annoyed that I can't laugh about if for at least six months even though I tell it to random strangers in the checkout line in the supermarket. But they can't understand the question of physicists and fish tanks if they don't like fish, which is why I need to post about it here.
A couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to act on my vague idea that if I could find the right connector, I could hook up a hose to some extra tubing and then to my siphon, allowing me to water a dry patch of flowers. But when I went outside, I discovered that my husband had connected two really long hoses together so tightly that I couldn't separate them. I asked him to do it for me and put the end of the first one into the flower bed, and he did. No problem. I was running around doing other chores and occasionally checking in to make sure that the one uneducable emerald cory hadn't gotten sucked up again, when I suddenly realized that 2 hours (!) had passed, and the water had gone down less than an inch. When I complained to my husband about it, he said the problem was that there was too much air in the hose. Now, we live on a slope, and even I know how to use a self-starting siphon and that water seeks its lowest level. So I went outside and discovered that instead of disconnecting the 2 hoses, he had wrapped 200 feet around back up the slope and then into the flowers. Yes, there's a theory of gravity, but then there's also the reality of gravity. I let him have it.
And yet he works on a particle accelerator? Sigh.
