pane in the but
Sep. 6th, 2010 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138Obligatory themed lolcat.
My lampwork beadmaking instructor finally resumed our local classes, after a summer hiatus for him to go teach intensive day/week-long sessions elsewhere. I think I've managed to recover most of the basic grokkage from the spring classes about working with hot glass (no major injuries yet yay), but I'm still having trouble broaching technical discussions with him about how to do certain things.
Part of this is the sheer orthogonality of approaches-- I have a fair amount of theoretical geekage on the subject, but don't know how it translates into practical working conditions; he has a great deal of experience and skill with the hands-on stuff, but not nec'ly much knowledge of why it happens.
(And also, I am a big geek with no conversational skills. Case in point: we all get to wear didymium safety lenses, since they screen out certain colors and make it easier to see what's going on inside the flame. He reminded someone that their regular sunglasses wouldn't do for this purpose, and we had to wear the didymium lenses, whatever dydimium was. I incautiously infodumped that didymium was a mixture of the two different rare-earth elements neodymium and praseodymium, which might explain why the neodymium-based "lavender" glass looked colorless when seen through the lenses, and that neo-lavender looked blue under the fluorescent working lights but purple under incandescent lights and sunlight, and then I ran out of infodump. Crickets chirped. I slunk down in my chair, resumed melting glass, and waited a few minutes for the normal conversations to resume around me.)
But I've also realized that though I had a lot of small bits and pieces of knowledge about glass color chemistry, it didn't really fit into a coherent theoretical framework-- I could chirp out factoids about opaque/translucent glass containing fluoride compounds, but didn't know why/how they turned the glass opaque instead of simply changing its color. (And I had a total abject fail when suddenly asked to explain what colloids were. "They're a mixture of stuff... with other stuff?" *bzzzt*)
So I found a glass expert to briefly pester through email until he suggested a good reference book (Coloured Glasses by WA Weyl), which turned out to be nearly unavailable in the US so I special-ordered it from the UK. It was written in the 1950s, but seems to be considered the seminal work in the field-- heck, it's a current publication of the UK Society of Glass Technology. In any case, it's still mostly over my head, so I've been using a repeat-skimming approach-- find a particular topic in the index, go to that section, and then stare at the pages and hope to understand about 10-20% of what's going on if I'm lucky.
This led me to the next step of concluding that I still didn't understand the underlying mechanics of what the actual chromophores were doing in there, which led me to a very neat book called The Physics and Chemistry of Color: Fifteen Causes of Color by Kurt Nassau-- luckily, our local library system had a copy. (Hmm... this site is a very simplified adaptation of the book; Nassau is listed in the credits, so I'll have to examine that in more detail.) I've managed to hack my way through maybe three or four chapters of the book so far, and have decided that I'd better find and buy a copy of this too because otherwise I'll never finish it before the due date. As it turns out, there's a more recent edition, and I found a non-insanely-priced used copy which should be on its way soon. I hope.
The thing is, the farther down I keep reading, the more dumber I feel wrt not really understanding the basic concepts involved. There are all these "aha! ...but wait oh crud" ricochets of "Oh, okay-- so the color of an elemental flame test is directly correlated to how much energy it takes to goose that element's outer electrons up into higher orbitals, and therefore to how much energy is released when the electrons drop back down to their base state, because there's an automatic connection between the energy level of the emitted photons and their wavelength... but wait a moment, do I actually understand what photons *are*? What are their 'wavelengths' really waving? And how can their energy levels vary if they have no mass and constant speed in a given medium and so their momentum should be either constant or zero oh crud."
And this was after several cycles of laboriously reacquainting myself with other things I theoretically learned in college: the general concept of correlating energy and wavelength at all (sadly, my main memories of physics classes are of falling asleep in them); what atomic orbitals do and how they interact; and, um, lots of stuff. Mixed with other stuff.
I should probably give up on trying to "visualize" what photons are doing and look for a "Photons for Dummies" book. Gah.
My lampwork beadmaking instructor finally resumed our local classes, after a summer hiatus for him to go teach intensive day/week-long sessions elsewhere. I think I've managed to recover most of the basic grokkage from the spring classes about working with hot glass (no major injuries yet yay), but I'm still having trouble broaching technical discussions with him about how to do certain things.
Part of this is the sheer orthogonality of approaches-- I have a fair amount of theoretical geekage on the subject, but don't know how it translates into practical working conditions; he has a great deal of experience and skill with the hands-on stuff, but not nec'ly much knowledge of why it happens.
(And also, I am a big geek with no conversational skills. Case in point: we all get to wear didymium safety lenses, since they screen out certain colors and make it easier to see what's going on inside the flame. He reminded someone that their regular sunglasses wouldn't do for this purpose, and we had to wear the didymium lenses, whatever dydimium was. I incautiously infodumped that didymium was a mixture of the two different rare-earth elements neodymium and praseodymium, which might explain why the neodymium-based "lavender" glass looked colorless when seen through the lenses, and that neo-lavender looked blue under the fluorescent working lights but purple under incandescent lights and sunlight, and then I ran out of infodump. Crickets chirped. I slunk down in my chair, resumed melting glass, and waited a few minutes for the normal conversations to resume around me.)
But I've also realized that though I had a lot of small bits and pieces of knowledge about glass color chemistry, it didn't really fit into a coherent theoretical framework-- I could chirp out factoids about opaque/translucent glass containing fluoride compounds, but didn't know why/how they turned the glass opaque instead of simply changing its color. (And I had a total abject fail when suddenly asked to explain what colloids were. "They're a mixture of stuff... with other stuff?" *bzzzt*)
So I found a glass expert to briefly pester through email until he suggested a good reference book (Coloured Glasses by WA Weyl), which turned out to be nearly unavailable in the US so I special-ordered it from the UK. It was written in the 1950s, but seems to be considered the seminal work in the field-- heck, it's a current publication of the UK Society of Glass Technology. In any case, it's still mostly over my head, so I've been using a repeat-skimming approach-- find a particular topic in the index, go to that section, and then stare at the pages and hope to understand about 10-20% of what's going on if I'm lucky.
This led me to the next step of concluding that I still didn't understand the underlying mechanics of what the actual chromophores were doing in there, which led me to a very neat book called The Physics and Chemistry of Color: Fifteen Causes of Color by Kurt Nassau-- luckily, our local library system had a copy. (Hmm... this site is a very simplified adaptation of the book; Nassau is listed in the credits, so I'll have to examine that in more detail.) I've managed to hack my way through maybe three or four chapters of the book so far, and have decided that I'd better find and buy a copy of this too because otherwise I'll never finish it before the due date. As it turns out, there's a more recent edition, and I found a non-insanely-priced used copy which should be on its way soon. I hope.
The thing is, the farther down I keep reading, the more dumber I feel wrt not really understanding the basic concepts involved. There are all these "aha! ...but wait oh crud" ricochets of "Oh, okay-- so the color of an elemental flame test is directly correlated to how much energy it takes to goose that element's outer electrons up into higher orbitals, and therefore to how much energy is released when the electrons drop back down to their base state, because there's an automatic connection between the energy level of the emitted photons and their wavelength... but wait a moment, do I actually understand what photons *are*? What are their 'wavelengths' really waving? And how can their energy levels vary if they have no mass and constant speed in a given medium and so their momentum should be either constant or zero oh crud."
And this was after several cycles of laboriously reacquainting myself with other things I theoretically learned in college: the general concept of correlating energy and wavelength at all (sadly, my main memories of physics classes are of falling asleep in them); what atomic orbitals do and how they interact; and, um, lots of stuff. Mixed with other stuff.
I should probably give up on trying to "visualize" what photons are doing and look for a "Photons for Dummies" book. Gah.