“In person? No. I’ve seen images of our microscopy labs, though.” In my car, I’ve brought some of those images, plus lists of all our microscopy equipment, a lot of which I’ve memorized so I can tell Kit about it if she asks. Her eyes brighten again. She looks so excited to show this to me.
“Okay,” she says, as we walk into the anteroom—it’s basically a small, dimly lit office, with a set of cabinets and countertop along the back wall and the microscope’s LED screen and control panel dominating most of the room. I know enough to know that the microscope itself is behind the door in front of me, and that Kit will manipulate it and watch her images appear from here.“So,” she says, pointing to a seat distractedly, and I sit, eager to watch her.“First things first, before I take you in there to see it. The Titan—that’s what we call it—allows you to look at anything from 1000 times magnification tomillionsof times magnification. You can image anything from cells to individual atoms. It’s incredible.” I’m keeping up, but then she says,“You can also use it to manage or measure chemical composition with electron energy loss spectroscopy.”
“Uh, right.”
“Don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense right now.” She takes out a diagram of what I assume is the inner workings of the microscope and sets it on my lap, wheeling her own chair closer to mine, so that our knees are almost touching. I can smell her shampoo, herby and yet sweet, and—I really need to pay attention. She gives me a brief but—to my mind—still damned complicated explanation about the basic parts of the microscope, how it works, and I impress myself by being able to make enough sense of it to ask a few questions. When I do, she seems to relish it—she does this little bounce in her seat that I find completely distracting.
“So theNaturearticle,” she says, and it takes me a minute to remember what she’s talking about, to remember how I goaded her into this.“The authors used a high angle annular dark field mode.”
“That sounds awesome.Like something fromStar Wars.”
She rolls her eyes.“It’s not awesome! I mean it is, but—okay, remember what I told you. The probe on the microscope is focused to a point and then rastered over the sample. The probe hits an atom, and the electrons scatter.” Here, she clenches her fists and the spreads her fingers wide,“scattering,” I guess, and I can’t help but smile at her enthusiasm, at how absorbed she is in explaining this to me.“In a high angle scattering, the way they did it, you’re collecting only electrons that hit heavy atoms. But in a structure that contains a high concentration of light atoms such as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen—a lot of information can be lost if you only look at heavy atom scattering.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Plus,” she adds dramatically,“since the probe is focused to such a sharp point, the scattered intensity can change as you change the depth of focus of the probe.” She looks up at me.“If you make a probe joke, you have to leave.”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“I sensed it. I sensed the probe joke. I have to show this machine to undergraduates all the time, and you can’t imagine the probe jokes I get.”
I drop my eyes.“Okay, I kind of wanted to make a probe joke.”
She shakes her head, smiling, but continues.“TheNatureauthors were going for maximum contrast, but they’re only looking at essentially one layer of atoms. If you want to see more, you have to take a focal series. You have to change the focal point in relation to the surface of the material in order to get a full picture of the volume of the material. It’s—okay, say you have a stack of pages. If you only take one page out and look at it, that doesn’t tell you what’s going on in the rest of the book, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say, nodding, because actually, the metaphor helps. Probably I should ask her to go back to the beginning and explain it all that way, but honestly, I like hearing her talk so much jargon. I like how fast she’s going, how her body is moving in all these subtle ways—the shifts in her seat, the motions of her hands—as though she’s trying to release all the energy she contains.
“And then, there’s the sample.” From the counter, she takes two tiny Ziploc bags, each with what look to me like very similar minuscule, thin metal disks. But no way, she explains, and for the next ten minutes it’s all about the ferromagnetism and sample polishing and the focused ion beam system she thinks they should have used.“This kind of sample,” she says disdainfully, holding up one of the bags,“is going to make it like you’re looking through a bent mirror and trying to describe the way someone looks.”
Kit then explains to me the way she prepares her own samples.“How long does it take?” I ask, and she gives me such a wide smile that I feel my heart trip over itself.
“Well, most people would maybe take two, two and a half hours to do this. But I’m really good. I can do it in one.” She flushes, and then says,“Not to sound arrogant or anything.”
“You don’t,” I say.“You sound amazing.” And I mean it. She does sound amazing. I’ve met a lot of scientists, spent a lot of time talking with them about their work, but Kit has this—I don’t know—joyfulquality about the way she talks about it. She loves the science—that’s as clear as a bell.
Over the next hour, she takes me in to show me the microscope itself, which reminds me of one of those free-standing panic rooms. It’s a big gray box taller than I am, lined with sound absorbers and dotted with various temperature controls that Kit shows me. Then she shows me how she sets up the beam direction, how she changes the magnification. It’s interesting in and of itself, the rational part of me knows this. But I also know I’m finding it so interesting because it’shertelling me, because I feel as if I’m learning some of the most important stuff about her by being here. When I’m sitting next to her at the control panel, watching as she brings up various images on the screen—to me, they’re just white polka dots on a black background—I feel strangely close to her, in a way that I know isn’t good for the job.
“So, Kit,” I say, pulling myself back on course as she’s narrowing her eyes at a new image she’s brought up.“How come you’re down here doing this work at…” I look down to check my watch,“eight thirty p.m., instead of, you know, during work hours.”
“Oh,” she says, half-distracted, absorbed in her image.“During the day, I’m doing tech stuff, helping other people with their experiments, or doing repairs on the scopes. And I do some instruction for classes too, when I’m needed. So my days are really pretty busy. But after hours I can get a lot of this really cool stuff done on my own.” She pauses, looks sideways at me, suspicious. She knows right where I’m headed with this.
“You should have this kind of access all the time.”
“Idohave access,” she says, looking back at the screen.“I like how it is here—how I can be involved in a lot of different parts of running the machine. I’m good at experiments, but I’m good at tech stuff too. I’m good at repairs, and I’m good at teaching.”
“Right, but—the stuff you’re doing here, this has real application potential.” I point toward the screen.“You’re figuring out what makes this sample a strong metal, right?”
“Right,” she says, leaning back in her chair and rotating to face me.“So?”
“We—well, the metallurgy division at Beaumont—we want to know that too. We want to know why that metal is so strong so that we can engineer a metal similar to it, one that’s not going to corrode at a high temperature, or when it’s wet. You can find that. You can help us build a new fan blade in a turbine engine, or a new…”
“I know that,” she says, interrupting me.“I know there’s applications for what I do, obviously. But that’s not what I’m interested in. I’m interested in the basic science. I’m not interested in having my agenda set by a company’s product line. Obviously I’m not against it if my research finds its way to an application stage, but I’m not interested in being the one to put it there.”
“But what if you were promised the kind of freedom you’re talking about? What if you were working with a team big enough that you could do your experiments, and someone else would take on the business of application?”
She shakes her head.“It doesn’t work that way. There’s too much interference.”
“Kit, you’re surrounded by interference here. That’s what you just said. You’re working on other people’s projects, you’re showing other people the ropes, you’rerepairingstuff…”
