Here’s a quick little picture of how to power a 741 op-amp with two 9V batteries. Just for reference. Included is the trim pot for offset null. This setup connects the batteries in series and the positive and negative rails are connected outside of the frame. You can see that the batteries create a virtual ground where they connect and this serves as the circuit’s ground, while the blue rail serves as ~ -9V and the red rail as ~ +9V.…

Wow, using WordPress was supposed to be easy. In my opinion, definitely the opposite. What a pain. Redid the whole thing using Hugo. Much easier. The main thing is you feel so much more in control and you don’t have to dance through a million bells and whistles that you don’t need.…

Population inversion has been a tricky concept for me. How can a photon, crashing into an electron, something that usually adds energy, actually cause the electron to lose energy? This isn’t meant to be a rigorous treatment of this topic, but rather a helpful way to think about this intuitively so that it doesn’t feel so wrong. In short, I think of this phenomenon by personifying the objects in question.…

Finally! I’ve been trying to get this experiment to work for a while but I the signal was always too weak. In class with Dr. Podzorov, we learned about op-amps so I figured I’d give it a shot to finally get this experiment working. It worked! In David and Shanni Prutchi’s book Exploring Quantum Physics Through Hands-On Projects, one of the first experiments they describe is a way to automatically scan the interference pattern produced by something like a laser shining through a double-slit.…

For now this is intended to be my second brain. Bring together the scattered notes from notebooks, post-its, book margins, the cloud, local files, wherever. Also kind of an open journal. Things that, while they may be personal, like most things I don’t mind them being publicly visible. So a little bit of a status brain dump to begin. We’ve got a few things going on actively or tumbling around the back of the brain.…