In Cork!

Alright, so I know I've been kind of lax on the blogs lately. Sorry to those of you who lost interest and aren't reading this anymore... but you won't read this anyway, so I just apologized to nobody. Whatever. Anyway, I got settled in here, and I'm living in a 7 person house full of other "foreigners." There are 3 Americans, one from Santa Barbara, one from Seattle, and myself. There's 1 Canadian from Toronto, and he's actually got the personality type of Brad Wallace, meaning he's sociable and has that courteousness towards people that makes them feel included and enforces their opinions, even when he doesn't agree. I don't know if that really makes sense, but does Brad really make sense? Anyway, there's also a guy from Britain. That's it for the males, and there are 2 females, one from Romania and one from China. There's also a house behind ours full of foreigners. There are 3 Canadians there, 2 French people, one girl from Spain, at least one girl from Poland, and one Irish guy. Our house is kind of known as the "party house" meaning people come over to our house when they want to hang out because it's got a big common room that's somewhat separated from the rest of the house. It's been great. I know some of you are interested in the project I'm working on, so I'll give a short explanation and a long explanation.

First, the short explanation: I am making a computer model of the way light travels through something called a waveguide (basically a fiber optics cable).

Now for the long explanation (don't worry, I won't be offended if you skip this): A waveguide is something that guides light waves... which is where the waveguide gets its name. The way it works is the waveguide is very thin (only about 1/200 of a millimeter thick) and it's attached to something called the substrate. The waveguide section is called the core, and the air on top of the waveguide is called the cladding. Every material has something called an index of refraction. For those of you who have forgotten your physics, the index of refraction is based on how fast light travels through that medium. It's basically like a person who can walk through air vs. a person who walks through water. The person walking through air will travel faster than the person who is traveling through water, even though they exert the same amount of effort. The air has an index of refraction of 1 (basically) meaning light is not slowed down at all. The core has the highest index of refraction, and the substrate has one an index between the air and the core. There is a phenomenon called total internal reflection that happens when light strikes the surface of a material at a very shallow angle and the material the light travels through is higher than the material on the other side of the surface. When the light is totally internally reflected, no light escapes the material. This is how fiber optics works. The light continually bounces off the walls of the material at shallow angles, and it can thus be guide to wherever you need it to go, provided the angle isn't too sharp. Now, as some of you may know, light is an electromagnetic wave, and so it exhibits an electric and magnetic field. What I am doing is making a computer model in C++ of the electric and magnetic fields of the light as it is traveling down the waveguide. This is so we can figure out things like the optimum shape of the waveguide so as to produce the least amount of energy loss, which would really help things like information transfer. I think it's pretty cool, but some of you may have already exited the window, or skipped down to here. That's cool.

Anyway, this is basically the thesis of the dissertation for the PhD that my "boss" is working for. His name is Rob, and he's very Irish. Sometimes, I can't really understand what he's saying, but I'm getting more used to the accent. At least he actually speaks English (most of the time anyway - sometimes it sounds like another language). Our supervisor's name is Dr. Frank Peters, and he's from Canada and worked in Silicon Valley for 12 years. That's cool because he actually has my accent, so it's easy to understand him. I also found out that he's a fairly strong Christian, and he was able to direct me to a pretty cool church that I checked out last Sunday. I was very thankful for that. Since then, we've had some discussions about God and how to incorporate that into a physics career. I'm so glad that God put someone like that in my life, so thanks to all of you for your prayers in that area.

Anyway, this weekend a bunch of us are going to Galway, where we are going to visit the Cliffs of Moher. Apparently they are one of Ireland's biggest attractions, and there's a 10-mile hike that we're going to go on. I'm pretty excited about it, and a lot of the people going with us are excited about it too, so that makes me even more excited because I know they're probably not going to wimp out. So I'm leaving for that at 1:30 tomorrow on a bus with everyone else. It's going to be awesome. Other then that, we got memberships to the local gym. The way they let you inside is they read your fingerprint and that opens the gate for you. Pretty cool I think. Almost like Gattaca if any of you have seen that movie. Anyway, they have a basketball court and a rock climbing gym, so I've been able to stay active. It's pretty cool. Anyway, I think that's all I have to say. If any of you have questions or just want to say hi, feel free to comment or email me at steven.horne@tyndall.ie. That way I won't have to wade through all my junk email to find your email. Also, blogspot and facebook are blocked at my office because I guess they don't want people messing around when they're supposed to be working. I love all you guys!