Heart Land

I work in a very dangerous place and have a very challenging job. How challenging? Let me describe it to you.

Sometimes I go to a lab with a UV laser that can pulse an intense beam onto a very focus spot and put 20mJ in 0.000000023 second. That creates a temperature well over 1 million Celsius degrees on virtually any surface it hit on. That’s almost the temperature at the core of the Sun. Luckily all that happens in less than a millionth of a second and it won’t penetrate anywhere more than 1% of the thickness of your hair.

Sometimes I go to a kitchen full of wonderful chemicals. Basically you must wear like a ‘Power Ranger’ to handle these magic potions. Why so? Because I was told there is a chemical so lethal that when it spills on you, you will not feel anything but the naughty chemical simply goes through your skin and feeds on your bones! Sounds scary enough?

From the workplace, I also learn that electrons in our cellphones or laptops are traveling at almost 4000 times faster than the allowed speed limit of some of the expressways in Singapore. Though very small and light, these ’speedy Gonzales’ in you computers are so fast that when they are moving in packs, they actually collide and force the copper atoms that are more than 100000 times heavier to move!

Sometimes I use a machine to look at things that cannot be seen by the naked eye. Depending on my luck, I sometimes manage to see lines that the diameters are only 30 to 40 atoms wide. By the way that’s the smallest thing I have made so far. What’s more interesting is there is another machine capable of putting down atoms layer by layer at a time!

Sometimes, I have to knock on the door of a person who uses another awesome machine to peek into sample more than 1000 times thinner than my hair, just to find out the size of an atom has changed by 0.5% under immense stress.

Cool right?

Okay, that kind of motivate me, again…