Nearly there

1.04pm. Had a good but seemingly very long lab, but I did have a little bit of a hangover. Not as much as Paul, though!

We finally got the fine gas tube to work, made it produce nice electron beams (see below) and before long we were making tight corkscrew shapes by changing the voltages and currents applied. Hard to do, harder to measure and not straightforward to photograph, but we got some results, which is the main thing.

It's not every day that you get to measure electron beams.

And after a morning during which Paul and I were both tired and struggling to stay motivated, a swift intellectual kick up the arse needed to be repeatedly administered. But we got there, we got some good data. The maths was quite difficult though, a pretty high number of variables to input, and I ended up doing the maths about four times, each time getting a different number for the charge to mass ratio of the electron.

Teddy ended up fairly badly out of the pram, and I had to ask for help. It turned out that we'd made a simple error plotting our graph, and we had picked voltage and current-squared to go on the wrong axes, so our gradient (which was needed for our analysis work) was also wrong.

We ended up with a figure which was about three times the size of the others, but to be honest by then I couldn't really have cared less. I was just happy that it was in the same order of magnitude, and I was happy to leave, thanking the tutors very much for all their help, and trying not to grit my teeth. I decided that having 'fat' electrons was better than ending up with no measurement at all.

Walked up the hill for the final time, and to lunch. I'm feeling very warm with my jacket on, despite the coolness of Durham this week it is the first time I have worn it for a week, because of having to check out of the room before 10am. We have all enjoyed the course but we all just want to get the TMA and then get the frak out of here to be perfectly honest!