3 ms·

That's sounds horrific. It makes me wonder what proportion of time you'd spend massaging and debugging your lab equipment vs. actually using it?

gaze 3y ago
For an experimental physicist you basically debug until you get the data for your paper or until you find your sample is bad. So you’re debugging 99% of the time. In many fields it’s rare to build new instrumentation. You fab with well known techniques with one subtle modification, so it’s not even clear what part of your time isn’t spent debugging.
causality0 3y ago
It's like a high-end fighter jet. An F-22 needs 43 man-hours of maintenance per flight hour.
gus_massa 3y ago
And that does not include the problems with electric wires. We had an unofficial rule: after half an hour debugging the electric wires just change all of them. I still have nightmares about BNC connectors.
- gaze 3y ago
  That’s a pretty terrible rule. Unless you’re rolling over them with chair wheels, a bad BNC cable should be easy to spot by visual inspection. In my 20 years of instrumentation work it’s rarely the cable.
  - gus_massa 3y ago
    It was a students' lab, where each device is connected and disconnected 2 or 3 times per day, 5 days per week. The wires get a lot of use and abuse. Usually the problem is the tip that got slightly loose and the signal is now intermittent or null. IIRC, when we detected the wrong wire we had to put it in a box and the guy in charge of the lab equipment would fix it later.
- dekhn 3y ago
  To that rule, my team added another: when throwing away the cable, cut it in half. So nobody scrounges a cable out of the garbage can only to waste more time debugging a bad cable.
  - throwawaymobule 3y ago
    I try to do this with every cable I throw out, and encourage anyone to do the same. Flaky HDMI especially.
ThePhysicist 3y ago
Basically 2-3 years of getting everything to work and testing each component, than 2-4 weeks of good measurements that comprise the main results of the PhD thesis.
- techdragon 3y ago
  Shame they don’t give you any extra certification or recognition for more than two years of learning about the care and maintenance of cryogenic high vacuum systems… that’s a whole persons job in some places! I’m not looking forward to thermal vacuum testing for my robots… because I don’t think there’s a big enough chamber in Australia… option one is (assuming funding) building a thermal vacuum chamber that can get down to GEO level vacuum with all the fun a large volume vacuum system entails… option two is shipping the entire thing to a friendly country with larger chambers (ESA in EU or NASA in the USA) but then there’s the space technology export paperwork … and I don’t know which would be worse.
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
If you’ve got an apparatus with 20 parts (a low estimate) and they’re all independently 95% reliable (a high estimate), it’s only gonna be in a usable state 36% of the time.

gaze 3y ago

For an experimental physicist you basically debug until you get the data for your paper or until you find your sample is bad. So you’re debugging 99% of the time. In many fields it’s rare to build new instrumentation. You fab with well known techniques with one subtle modification, so it’s not even clear what part of your time isn’t spent debugging.

causality0 3y ago

It's like a high-end fighter jet. An F-22 needs 43 man-hours of maintenance per flight hour.

gus_massa 3y ago

And that does not include the problems with electric wires. We had an unofficial rule: after half an hour debugging the electric wires just change all of them. I still have nightmares about BNC connectors.

gaze 3y ago
That’s a pretty terrible rule. Unless you’re rolling over them with chair wheels, a bad BNC cable should be easy to spot by visual inspection. In my 20 years of instrumentation work it’s rarely the cable.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  It was a students' lab, where each device is connected and disconnected 2 or 3 times per day, 5 days per week. The wires get a lot of use and abuse. Usually the problem is the tip that got slightly loose and the signal is now intermittent or null. IIRC, when we detected the wrong wire we had to put it in a box and the guy in charge of the lab equipment would fix it later.
dekhn 3y ago
To that rule, my team added another: when throwing away the cable, cut it in half. So nobody scrounges a cable out of the garbage can only to waste more time debugging a bad cable.
- throwawaymobule 3y ago
  I try to do this with every cable I throw out, and encourage anyone to do the same. Flaky HDMI especially.

ThePhysicist 3y ago

Basically 2-3 years of getting everything to work and testing each component, than 2-4 weeks of good measurements that comprise the main results of the PhD thesis.

techdragon 3y ago
Shame they don’t give you any extra certification or recognition for more than two years of learning about the care and maintenance of cryogenic high vacuum systems… that’s a whole persons job in some places! I’m not looking forward to thermal vacuum testing for my robots… because I don’t think there’s a big enough chamber in Australia… option one is (assuming funding) building a thermal vacuum chamber that can get down to GEO level vacuum with all the fun a large volume vacuum system entails… option two is shipping the entire thing to a friendly country with larger chambers (ESA in EU or NASA in the USA) but then there’s the space technology export paperwork … and I don’t know which would be worse.

NotYourLawyer 3y ago

If you’ve got an apparatus with 20 parts (a low estimate) and they’re all independently 95% reliable (a high estimate), it’s only gonna be in a usable state 36% of the time.