CroBlog

Thanks to Mike Benson's wonderfully phrased and pertinent comment to this post, I have been reminded to actually make a post of a greater informative nature. However, I must point out to Mike that there are only three cats in this series of pictures (at most twelve, if each cat that appears to be the same one was replaced with one of very very similiar appearance) and more than twelve different people appear in these photographs (grantedly assuming there does not exist some elaborate costumed conspiracy...).

For all of you very few who have stumbled onto this blog crawling across the web (God forbid someone thought it has any content of particular merit and linked to it =P ), I'm Greg Nelson, a reasonably well-adjusted and mentally sound Physics and Computer Science double major at Georgetown University in the class of 2007, even though that may appear to be a contradiction. I went to high school at Saint Lawrence Seminary in Mount Calvary, Wisconsin, and I credit my parents, sister, teachers and brothers there, as well as my teachers at the Dickinson Area Catholic School, for the better aspects of my personality, and their analogues at Georgetown University for their continual development. I enjoy acting, singing, Aikido, foreign film, anime, casually studying law and international law in the vein of patents and copyright, and life in general. I dislike how all the flying insects in a dark room are attracted to the glow of a computer monitor, especially that of a laptop, which is not easily cleaned as far as I have figured out. My thought tends to follow arguably tenuous connections from topic to topic, and I suspect that my casual writing will only exacerbate this tendency.

I flew to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, on the 22nd of May 2005 (after singing at the Baccalaureate Mass in the Chapel Choir), carrying six laboratory samples of Tantalum Nitride (TaN) with different concentrations of Ta and N (though not in a silver briefcase with matching handcuffs, as my dramatic side had wished for). I personally am going on this trip because I want to learn more about and experience the experimental side of physics in an international context. I also enjoy traveling and hope to use the trip as a time to think about things and reexamine where I am in life and where I want to see myself go, in that elusive yet important general sense. It is also financially appealing because of a National Science Foundation grant to Dr. Jim Freericks at Georgetown University and Dr. Veljko Zlatic of The Institute of Physics in Croatia for "Combining ab Initio Methods and Many-Body Theory to Describe the Electron-Phonon Interaction in Real Materials," (this description of their activity is according to the Institute's website and I have no precise idea what that exactly means; anyone other than really crazed physics majors, like Nick Malaya (sorry I don't have a website to link your name with, old chap ;) ), probably have even less and couldn't care comparatively as much.). The NSF likes seeing students get exchanged in these international collaborations, and thus my trip is a nice, round ball of national science policy in action, for all you SFS kids reading this blog, te he he. As a self-note I pledge not to abuse parentheses in the future. I reserve the right to excessive hyperlinking.

We are measuring the electrical resistance and thermopower of these samples from room temperature all the way down to about 4.1 Kelvin( i.e. 4.1 degrees above absolute zero or about -452.29 degrees Fahrenheit) using liquid Helium and liquid Nitrogen to cool them. To get a general idea of just how incredibly ridiculously cold that is, look at this table of temperatures. As a side note I find it amusing and ironic that we are using the liquid form of one element to measure the properties of a material as the composition of Ta and that same element varies.

I will be flying back to Washinton, D.C., around the 8th of July.