Sometimes things end up looking like something completely unintended.

For my recent experiments I had to put together the little x-ray scattering vacuum chamber again. The last time we used it there didn’t seem to be anything special about its appearance. However, this time there seemed something quite peculiar as I put things together. It looked very similar to an elephant or an insect.

Here I’ve removed the long hose from the front “snout,” but the effect is still there. The two largest ports where the x-rays come in and go out (which above are glass, but replaced by Beryllium windows) make the eyes. It’s got ears and a nose, along with a couple of dangling arms/appendages. In truth it really was not intended to look like something else. It’s a surface scattering chamber complete with vacuum hardware and measurement pieces, an RF induction heating system, rotating sample stage feedthrough, fine-adjust gas flow leak-valves, burst-disk, and enough windows that I can see the sample positions during the experiment.

One of my friends took one look at it and said, “Ganesh!” The name stuck. So we have a vacuum chamber named after a Hindu deity. Stranger things have happened (I recall the himalayan pray flags that routinely went up during experiments at one beamline at the ALS), but it is a little odd to have my surface scattering experiment refereed to with the proper name of a god. “How is Ganesha today? Is Ganesha’s pressure ok? Is Ganesha’s thermocouple measuring the temperature accurately?”

It turns out that Ganesha the deity is often seen as a patron of science (among many other things). So perhaps the little vacuum chamber Ganesha is not without some obtuse justification beyond mere appearance. For better or worse, the name has stuck and I surely hope that it’s not seen as offensive.

One further thought... Most of our samples involve at least some (if not large) parts made from precious metals such as gold and platinum. So there have ben several occasions where such precious metals have been “offered” to Ganesha. Thankfully he’s always returned them to us intact.

Often I’ve felt an odd “queasiness” at synchrotrons. Part of it is the constant noise and the inevitable fluorescent lights. But most of it comes from being in a large, very large, circular building where most everything looks the same. A small round room would be bad enough, but (I think) you’d rather quickly adjust after all it is in fact round and rather apparent. A synchrotron is a little different.

There’s the large size and there are also an enormous number of straight lines. However, there must also be bends...

The picture above looks like it’s been taken through a distorted lens. It seems like you should be looking down a hall and that it’s been manipulated to be skewed. But in fact, that’s just the way things look. It’s all big enough that it seems as though it should be straight. Pretty much anywhere in the facility, any way you look, you’ll see hallways, walls, pipes and conduits all going and bending in ways that just do not seem ‘right’.

One of my collaborators walked by me today, took one look and said, “Hopeless...”

He was referring to me after seeing the background on my laptop. Many people have meaningful pictures of loved ones, children or pets. Many people have photos from some place or event. Others have exotic graphics or pictures of beautiful imagined things. What do I have?

What is it and why am I hopeless?

The picture is a photo of an analog oscilloscope screen. The little green lines are pulses detected by an x-ray detector, one line per photon in a short period of time. When they overlap on the screen it can get quite bright. Anyhow, this is readily recognized in these parts (namely the Advanced Photon Source) as what an x-ray diffraction person uses to do experiments. Or at the very least, a tool to do the experiments. No one sits around and says, “that’s about 20% brighter... oh wait, 30% brighter... now dimmer.” It’s of course fed into a computer which records and counts them.