Notes from the Road - Day 5

2/3/04 11:10pm Bozeman, MT

I reached Bozeman today right around noon and Nicole, Mark’s wife, was home to greet me. Mark was at work at the University and their sons, Noah and Jack, were at school. We drove back into town to meet Mark for lunch at a Thai place near campus. Walking the grounds brought back memories of Purdue, students bundled up against the cold, snow on the ground but the walkways mostly clear. Some brave souls chanced riding their bikes like I had, despite the temperatures and increased chance of wiping out and maybe taking out innocent bystanders as well.

After lunch, we went to Mark’s classroom, where he’d apparently left his class in a very long lab. We met some of his fellow faculty, and Nicole told me Mark had taken one of the boys’ Power Ranger toy ray guns and helmet in to teach the class this morning. It was always more interesting when a professor brought in props. Mark is also working on a new radar system for the army that requires part of the device be kept at 4 degrees Kelvin, that is, 4 degrees above absolute zero. This prompted me to bring up a couple questions I’d had since high school, one of which involved reaching absolute zero. I’d been taught in high school that absolute zero could never be reached, because when an atom came close, the electrons orbiting the nucleus began to fall towards it, generating heat, which in turn pushed them back out. My idea had been to use static electricity to remove the electron(s) to avoid that problem, but Mark pointed out that the “orbiting” model of electrons, while useful for talking about atoms, didn’t tell the whole story because of quantum properties of electrons like spin, and even with the absence of electrons the very act of measuring the temperature of the atom would entail sending energy to it, thus generating heat. Even if it reached absolute zero, we couldn’t measure it at that temperature to prove it. Chalk another one up to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

The other question I’d had involved the refraction of light through prisms. I had speculated that it would be possible to design a series of prisms in such a way that, if they were set in a circle, a photon entering them would enter a circle inside the prisms that it could never escape. To my delight, Mark told me he knew people at the university who were members of a team that had done this very thing! What I had not anticipated, and what the researchers had observed, was that the photons either eventually did find their way out, or they were “absorbed” somehow. It was a little thrill that an original idea of mine had recently been brought to scientific fruition.

Nicole and I proceeded to the Museum of the Rockies in town, where she had a yearly pass, and checked out a display of black and white train photographs. Nicole is a professional photographer who has been published in national magazines. After that, she left to ferry the boys around and I looked around the other museum exhibits and took in a show in the planetarium about a mission to Saturn that should arrive later this year. The program was narrated by the actor who plays Dr. Phlox on Enterprise, and I was the only one in the room. In one of the exhibits on the Rocky Mountains, I discovered an addendum to my first entry. The ancient Rocky Mountains were pushed up with the formation of Pangea, the ancient super continent, but were weathered down to nothing over hundreds of millions of years, just like the Arbuckles. The newer Rocky Mountains that currently stand are only 100 million years old.

Mark picked me up at the museum at 5:00pm, and we picked up new box springs for the bed I’m staying in and brought it back to the house. Then we ate leftover enchiladas and went to a slide show and reading about arches that was held at a local independent bookstore. We got there a little late, but it was interesting. Most of the photos were of stone arches, but there were also ice, tree, and rainbow arches. We got back to the house shortly before Nicole and the kids, then they went to bed and I watched High Fidelity for the first time in my room. Nicole collects John Cusack movies.