When my parents came to visit, we all took a trip to Irvine so they could see where I was working. (Although I was enrolled as a student at UC Riverside, I was working at UC Irvine.) Here are some pictures my Dad took while we were all wandering the campus.
Mike and I near the Physics building
My mom, sitting in front of a hibiscus plant. The center of the UCI campus has a large garden containing a variety of imported and/or exotic plants. There are eucalyptus trees in the
background.
Mike, Mom (lower right-hand corner) and I walking toward the Science and Engineering office/classroom building.
Mom and the crappy tree. (You can also see Mike and I wandering aimlessly in the background.) What's a crappy tree? There are some trees on the UCI campus that also seemed to
be very popular in LA; however, I quickly noticed that they all seemed to be bolted together with a network of strong cables. Someone I knew
at UCI explained that the trees grow very long heavy limbs that they cannot support. To avoid risk of lawsuit from having these
limbs fall on unsuspecting pedestrians, people drill large bolts into the trees and their limbs, then tie them together with
strong cables. "Well, that's crappy," I replied...and the name stuck.
Me, in front of the building that housed the Plasma Physics labs.
Here we are looking at the Z-pinch fusion lab. The idea of the Z-pinch was that it would collapse a strong magnetic
filed onto a frozen strand of material in order to ignite a fusion reaction. My part of the experiment would be to
build an X-ray laser for diagnostics; unfortunately, I never quite got that far.
