That was surprisingly fun!

Today was a good day, for the first time in far too long I got back into the lab and actually did some of my own work. At the same time I was able to observe some of my students doing their work as well... let's just say that I should be doing my own work much more often. Sadly it seems that what I need to teach my students most is common sense, of all things, why that?

Anyway, let's not focus on the facepalm worthy moments caused by others; instead let us focus on my triumphs. As it is more fun, and makes me look better. Of course now that I bring it up I realize that my success was in chemistry, which is about as exciting to hear about as the play-by-play of a staring contest. But seeing as I already have you hear I may as well say something.

So to spare you the details, and to avoid possibly being scooped by other chemists, let me just say that most of the predictions that I had for my results today were wrong; and it's damn exciting! For people not involved in research, and in particular analytical chemistry, finding out that your predictions were wrong doesn't sound like much cause for celebration, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the same thing was said by physicists before the Large Hadron Collider failed; essentially, if the experiments came out the way they expected they would be pleased, but if things were different than expected things would be really exciting, as it means that the science would have to change to account for the difference.

Now, I haven't done anything as revolutionary as disprove the standard model of physics, but I did see things that certainly didn't do what I expected. Which was particularly interesting since the first time that I worked on this project, back in August, I saw something that was very cool and unexpected. Yet even with the expectations changed from the first experiments things were unexpected today. All in all it was pretty damn cool... in a very very geeky way, but that's what they pay me for.

Anyway, I just thought I would share the renewed enthusiasm I have for working in my lab. Even though I only have about a week left until the lab in flooded with 4 or 5 new undergrads, I really can't remember how many will be working for me this semester, that's probably not a good sign is it. Oh well, I'll just have whatever fun I can until then; because I'll be doing lots of writing once the kids are in the lab.