Time Sniffers (A Sample)

"Demise ad nihil": something cannot become nothing-so where'd it go?

Maybe most people would find it odd that our house has a full-fledged scientific laboratory in the basement, but I assure you-it doesn't look anything like Frankenstein's shop of horrors. No bubbling flasks of slimy green liquid simmering over Bunsen burners and emitting noxious odors, or glass tanks full of unnamable body parts floating in formaldehyde.

As I walk down the stairs and survey the room, I'm struck at how this small, dark space looks little more than an office, with fake wood paneling and my mom's antique roll-top desk against the wall. When you work with small lasers, all the corresponding parts-the focusing lenses, defractors, mirrors, beam splitters, photodiodes-are pretty small and far from impressive. Apart from the laser, and the sophisticated doped crystals (more about that later), mom's lab is pretty low-tech. There's a long flat table in the middle of the room for mounting all the parts. A swivel chair, a computer, a holo-vid player and large plastex screen, a disk storage cabinet. That's about all.

When I was little, instead of buying me a V-R Holo-Erector Set like the other kids had, Mom would set down her giant box filled with shiny metal and plastic parts, hand me a real Leatherman tool or a socket set, and let me at it. Just old-fashioned hands-on play. I constructed some pretty amazing castles and dragons, embellished with colored construction paper cutouts. With a stretch of imagination, you could tell the princess was trapped in the high tower while the knight fought off the dragon at the edge of the moat. Well, at least I could. But Mom and Dad listened in rapt attention to my very detailed tours of the elaborate kingdoms I built on that flat, metal table.

As I grew up and broke fewer things, Mom had me assist her with simulations and trials. I felt like a nurse in the operating room. "Bria, a twelve-inch tube, three magnets, one polarizer-that one, the bigger one." She'd be hunched over the table, fastening pieces, taking measurements while I slapped objects in her hand. There was a kind of magical hush that came over the room when she directed me to turn off the lights and the laser would shoot a beam-red, green, yellow, depending on which laser-and the light would bounce against mirrors, spread, change color, and do strange things as it interacted with the crystal.

My eighth-grade project won me a first at the state science fair-Generating Optical Second Harmonics Using Nonlinear Crystals. The title was so long it almost didn't fit on the backboard. I melted a few crystals (along with their plastic holders) in the process, but I did succeed. I even manufactured my own KDP crystals in a saturated saline solution-though the biggest one I could grow in that little ten-gallon aquarium was the size of my pinky fingernail. The crystals they grew at GNL weighed in at eight hundred pounds in two months.