Dim Plancks

12.28pm. Today we started the short experiments, and I am partnered with Roy. We got to the lab, and we had barely started, when the fire alarm rang. Sarah Webb, the tutor, told us all to get out. The alarms were loud enough to wake the dead, and I reflected with a hint of smugness that anyone with a hangover would now be feeling seriously yucky (although that was me on Sunday morning)!

Students milling around aimlessly whilst the fire alarm sounded.

The alarms seemed to last for ages, at least 15 minutes. As we stood outside, I reflected to Colin, Roy and Kirsten that none of us had seen a single fire warden, and nobody had taken a register, or even checked with us that everybody was accounted for. I'm a fire marshall at work so I have a fair bit of experience in this field.

When we eventually made it back to the lab, we made a start on the Planck's Constant experiment. It was fiddly to say the least, lots of pointless zero this, open that, zero something else. To be honest I found this aspect really confusing, and the equipment was in part difficult to use. Tiny rotations of the equipment ended up producing huge variations in the observed voltage/current, so it was not long before both of us were swearing under our breath, and then out loud. The c..t count (as we're calling it) has gone up drastically this week.

A hugely over-exposed photo of me and Roy... otherwise you wouldn't be able to see us. It was extremely dark in that lab!

After spending ages collecting data, we went into the PC lab to analyse, only to discover that we hadn't taken readings for something critical during the experiment, thereby invalidating all the results. Two fraking hours wasted. Not best pleased. We'll take Kirsten and Paul's data, but I wanted very much to get this right, as it might be on the assignment at the end of the week. Cross and frustrated.

Paul and Kirsten, looking for pieces of experiment to take apart or customise

The tutor is really good though. Her name is Sarah Webb, she is of short stature but she is as sharp as a needle, quite posh, with an enormous rack and I suspect likes her horses. She's good fun and loves that we're having fun as well as working very hard . It makes ending up with no usable data a little easier to stomach.

Later. Roy absented himself for quite some time, leaving Paul, Kirsten and me at PCs. After a while she went to look for him, and I felt cross about having wasted a couple of hours. However, once we collected Kirsten and Paul's printouts and went back to the Planck Constant experiment lab, we found Roy and Kirsten in there. No details of what is going on, but this was evidently marital-related.

But the good news is it appears that in actual fact, Roy and I haven't mucked things up, we have in fact done it right, and the others are the ones who are wrong. We just haven't gotten round to doing our graph yet.

We broke up for lunch, and walked back up the hill to Grey, and into the dining hall for lunch. We managed to get a seat by a window, which was really nice, great to have some natural light after spending two hours in almost darkness in the Planck lab.

Enjoying a rare chance to sit by the window at lunch.

Lots of talk about Roy's children. I was however suddenly almost overcome by a sense of regret of not having any children of our own, and I absented myself reasonably rapidly from the group. It's an old conversation between Alan and I; I would like children, I've wanted to have children for maybe 3-4 years but he has no interest, so that's the end of the matter. It's not an issue between us, in any way shape or form; you really do both have to want children. You can't make someone want children, and I accept and support his feelings wholly. But every now and again, maybe every couple of weeks, it pops into my head unbidden. 99 times out of 100 it pops in, I smile at the thought and it goes, but today was the 1 time that I felt a strong pang of regret, and felt the need to retire for a moment of privacy, and to shed a tear.

Feeling fine now, it went almost as quickly as it came, but it took me by surprise how strong it was. I'm back in my room now, typing this up on my laptop . In half an hour I need to be back in the lab, to finish off what's left of the Planck experiment, then it's onto the next one.

The idea with these short experiments is that there are about 5, you need ideally to complete at least 2, but we have the whole of today and tomorrow morning to do it, so it shouldn't be a problem.