Getting ideas published
Feb 17th 2008Wallabynerd alert & rants
It’s a really great feeling when an idea you had finally reaches the outside world.
For instance: I asked my adviser about extending the ultrafast fluorescence setups we already had, by converting the laser pulse into a supercontinuum excitation source and using that to excite fluorescence from a sample with excitation over a broad range of wavelengths. (The previous setup, like most, uses only a pretty narrow range of excitation wavelengths – so that if the sample isn’t excited by light of that frequency, nothing at all comes out.)
“Not practical,” he said. “Nobody would be interested in that. There’s no use for it.” He’s surprisingly reluctant to consider new ideas – even new ways of preparing a sample are likely to get a skeptical “no”.
Apparently someone stuck with it, though, since it’s just been published. Summary in Laser Focus World of a paper in Optics Express. Oh, and patented. Apparently they’re dreaming of medical-diagnostic applications, but realistically everyone is who can.
Good for them. And here’s to getting out from under his blinkered thumb…
