I was doing a little noodling around last night (research for my own novel. Jenny and Henry don’t have a duopoly on this business, you know) and came across this rather bittersweet image:
And then this morning I read a valedictory commentary (HT: Maxine at Nautilus). Let’s hope that SRS’s successor, Diamond, is even more successful.
Yes, kind of sad. I really enjoyed the Nature Materials piece.
I have a vested interest in Diamond being successful, as it increases the chances of fewer trips to Grenoble and Chicago, which are further from the homestead. (Quite considerably in the latter case; but even though Grenoble is nearer, getting all that equipment through the Alps is not trivial.)
The big advantage of Grenoble is that you don’t have to accompany your samples… it’s pretty much automated, and they have robotic Frenchmen who mount the crystals and whatnot. Very exciting.
I’ve no idea what SRS is. And if its successor involves Frenchmen mounting crystals, I think I might be better off in my ignorance.
Synchrotron radiation source (see N Materials article at link).
Probably not that many Frenchmen, as these are international facilities so not dominated by one nation. Or even crystals for that matter – my own particular family’s interest is fibre diffraction.
‘Robotic Frenchmen’ sounds better than ’ international facilities so not dominated by one nation and clever machines’.
There is a lot more than crystallography going on—but I was hoping to get away with shorthand. Sorry!.
Thanks for pointing out the image of the final “SRS status” – brought back many memories and stimulated a post of my own that will appear very soon. Did you ever use Daresbury yourself?
Oh yes, Stephen. I seem to remember writing as much somewhere, about many unusual if not ‘happy’ hours, and the industrial romanticism of it all.
Or did I dream that?
Or did I dream that?
Could be. Long periods at the synchrotron can lead to altered states of mind and strange hallucinations: “Look at those spots! This is a Nature paper for sure!”
I used to write letters to ex-members of the lab. They were funny, if somewhat twisted and cynical. I wrote one from Daresbury once, went back to look at it—wondered what the hell I’d been smoking.
I did say that! At the original entry.
I’m not going mad (shut up, Brooks).
ffft
God it’s so….easy…
Anyhoo, the erstwhile Dr.Mrs.Brooks used Daresbury too. But best of all was DESY (of course). Most of our apartment furniture at the time (looong time ago) was made of crates from all the Franizkaner Hefeweisen she brought back. That’s what a PhD is really about!