Labs

My spring break was not exactly super exciting, but I can’t complain. I went back to St. Louis, where my family lives. I got a lot of work done, and I got to hang out with my family for a bit. My family was cool. My siblings haven’t changed at all. I went back to my high school, which was fun. I pretty much just talked to my old teachers. I mainly talked to my sophomore chemistry teacher. We’re pretty much bros. I also talked to my Statistics/Calculus 3/Special Relativity teacher. He’s teaching himself General Relativity right now, which I also happen to be teaching myself (a bit). The thing that took up most of my time was applying to research labs for internships over the summer. While this took a lot of time, I enjoyed reading about the different research opportunities that are available. I hung out with one of my friends who was also back for spring break. We watched Jaws, which I had never seen before. Even though it wasn’t my birthday, my family decided to celebrate my birthday on Saturday. It pretty much consisted of eating some food and then eating cake. My mom proceeded to instruct my dad to stuff a Tupperware container full of cake for me to take back. I now have approximately 324 cubic inches of cake in my minifridge.

When I said I started learning General Relativity, I wasn’t exactly telling the whole truth. I looked into it, and I tried to start learning it, but I found out that I need to understand tensor calculus first. When I looked into tensor calculus, I found out that I need to learn about tensors first. So, I started watching videos about tensor math and taking notes in a small notebook. This ended up being the most fun thing I did over break. Whenever I got tired, I just started watching videos, and I stayed up for a few more hours. It’s incredibly fascinating, but all the notation is different. It basically uses the same symbols, but they all mean different things. Eventually I’ll get up to General Relativity, but for now, I’m still learning the basics.

The labs that I applied to are pretty cool. Two are in Albuquerque, and they are government research labs. One is Los Alamos National Laboratories, and if you know much about the ending of World War II, you might know that Los Alamos was responsible for developing the atomic bomb. Obviously, that wouldn’t be the kind of stuff I would be working on, but I guess it’s a fun fact. I also applied to a few different labs at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque. Sandia is home to the Z-machine, which is a device that stores energy in large capacitors which are in parallel and then discharges the capacitors after switching them to series. The massive current flows through tungsten fibers that are thinner than human hairs, and the fibers then turn into a plasma. The generated magnetic field then smashes the particles together at insanely high speeds. The resultant temperature gets to around 1.8 million degrees Celsius. This machine is used to research possibilities in fusion energy.

Cheers,

Adrian Fedorko