Oil Drops and Peanut Butter-Day 84-April 3rd, 2018

After some crappy sleep on the bus, we finally arrived in Grenoble around 1:30 AM. By some incredible stroke of luck, I was able to catch the very last A line tram of the night. I was incredibly grateful to not have a forty minute walk back.

I quickly unpacked and went to bed when I got back. I set an alarm for 4 AM, so I could watch the 2nd half of the Villanova game.

When I woke up from my nap, I was still super exhausted. Yet, I was still determined to watch the game. I’m not going to lie, as exciting as the game was, I still fell in and out of sleep a bunch while watching it. After all, it was 4:30 AM and I had an exhausting day of travel.

With a minute left in the game I feel asleep for good, and only realized this after I woke up. In my dream, Michigan made a quick comeback and won the game.

When I woke up around 8 AM this morning, I was disappointed and convinced that Villanova had lost due to my dream. It was a nice surprise to learn otherwise and I spent fifteen minutes watching highlights in my phone before getting up.

I was pretty tired from my spotty sleep, but a bowl of coffee with breakfast solved this problem. I headed out ready to seize the day.

Differential equations was pretty useless today. Half the class was missing and all we did was overly-complex linear algebra for the whole period. It was difficult to follow and the professor’s sloppy handwriting did not help. I tried my best to follow along.

I did not have physics lab until 1:30, so I headed with my classmates to the BU office to pick up my food stipend. After grabbing our money, Harry, Nick, Jonathan and I headed to La Natation for lunch. We usually go on Mondays, but I obviously didn’t have class yesterday.

In typical fashion, we all got the plat du jour. I get the feeling that most people who come here for lunch usually get this. Today was a turkey leg covered in a really good sauce, a variation of fries, and salad.

My lunch

None of my friends had physics lab this afternoon, so we parted ways after lunch. I headed back to the office to hang out with some of my physics classmates until it was time to go.

On the walk there, I saw Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups sitting in the window of the American store in Grenoble. I have walked past this store a million times, but have never gone in. They carry a bunch of stereotypical American and Canadian foods. A lot of it is pretty overpriced, and I fought the temptation to buy a jar of Skippy peanut butter for ten euros. Instead I bought a Reese’s, you need to treat yourself sometimes.

Peanut butter in candy is rare in Europe

I scarfed down all three peanut butter cups in less than two minutes. It was delicious and I already am craving it again.

After hanging out for twenty minutes with my classmates, we all headed to lab. This was my second to last lab and one of the most tedious ones. Still, it couldn’t be as bad as my six hour circuits ones.

Greg and I were recreating the Millikan oil drop experiment today. I will forgo all the complex details, but we were using a microscope, timer and electric field to find the unit electric charge for atoms.

The Lab Setup

When we squeezed the pump, it would send oil across the two metal plates. The metal plates were connected to a battery which let them create an electric field to charge the oil droplets. I had to look through the microscope and flip various switches on a box after the oil particle traveled 1 mm. Watching the particle through the microscope was super straining on my eyes. We had to make 120 measurements for the lab and they were all tracked on the computer.

Halfway through, the measurements were becoming really tedious and our results weren’t that good. I made the realization that we could create really good results without having to actually watch the particles. When we were flipping the switches , we were really just timing the particle’s travel twice. I used the stopwatch on my phone to figure out the best times to flip the switches in order to get good data. It worked flawlessly and I saved my eyes from a lot of strain.

I don’t really feel guilty for faking my data since I am not conducting real research. It is also difficult to get clean results in a lot of these labs.

After lab I headed home, got changed, then went to the gym. Today was leg day and I left the gym with my legs feeling like gelatin. I showered upon getting home and waited for dinner.

Dinner was great tonight. Not only was the food good, but I actually felt like I had real conversations in French. Anne-Marie and Andre asked me a lot about my trip to Venice and I had a lot to say about it. I really felt like I’m making real progress in becoming conversational in French.

The food at dinner consisted of sausage and salad as an appetizer, and beef and rice as the main course. It all tasted pretty good, A-M really knows how to feed me.

After dinner, I put off my French homework until tomorrow and just typed up this blog. I was still pretty exhausted and needed some good sleep tonight.

I called it a night and went to bed.