Elad’s blog

Grafite is far more stable then diamond. Among the forms of carbon found in nature, all diamonds are bound to turn into grafite, given enough time. Not that is will save you any money: the timeframes discussed are measured in thousands of years. At least, this is one of the nice things I learned in school last week.

In the past three weeeks I started to attend a few courses, in diverse subjects - from a physics course dedicated to small systems (”small”, as in carbon nano-tubes) through molecular biology and chemistry, and so forth. The term “Attending”, when related to these courses, is actually a bit far-fetching: I decided I wanted to attend them, but already managed to miss some lectures almost in each and every course (except the physics one) due to some on-going experiments I run in Rambam medical center these days; these mainly involve growing fibroblast cells and doing strange things to them (yesterday, for example,  I painted them in red), which is a lot of fun once you get used to the idea of doing fluorescent microscopy in a basement.

The physics course I now take turns out to be a real tour-de-force in solid-state, quantum physics, and related fields. Each lecture lasts for three long evening hours, at the end of which I breathlessly digest the material - today, for example, I found out why grafite  behaves electrically like a ”zero band-gap semiconductor” (whatever that means), and what is the “effective mass” of electrons in it, and other such lies/approximations physicists use to describe nature. Well, I asked for studies - and this is exactly what I get, and generously.  

Last week I had a fruitful talk with a German profesor, one Yoachim Spatz, who holds a chair as head of one of Max Planck’s labs, and visited the Technion. we hosted him in our lab for a few hours, and I had the opportunity to discuss my project with him. As it turned out, only today I introduced his ideas to my tutors, and we seriously consider using some of the tips he gave me. This could mean that major parts of the work I did in the past six months will have to be abandoned, and I am not sure how I feel about this - confused, maybe, is a good word.

Anyhow, until I decide what to do with it I continue full-power with my original plan. This plan involves a lot of studies, experiments, and more studies - these are expected to reach a new peak next week, when I will go to the dead sea for a full week of “nano-technology winter school”, which promises to be a lot of fun. Add to this the preparations for the wedding, which continue all the time and occupy most of my evenings and weekends, and you can understand why I am very busy lately - as you can tell from the rareness of writing lately: it is not that I don’t want, I just don’t have the time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 19:36 and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.