Griffiths says in the introduction to Elementary particle physics,
If you were dealing with two macroscopic objects, and you wanted to know how they interact, you would probably begin by holding them at various separation distances and measuring the force between them. That’s how Coulomb determined the law of electrical repulsion between two charged pith balls, and how Cavendish measured the gravitational attraction of two lead weights. But you can’t pick up a proton with tweezers or tie and electron onto the end of a piece of string; they’re just too small.
Oh, really?
Well, I guess to be fair, we call it “optical tweezer” but it looks nothing like actual tweezers. But if you want superficial similarity tweezers, there’s always atomic force microscopy, which uses cantilevers that, fundamentally and materially, isn’t that different from tweezers or any other long, slender objects.
It’s been busy 8 weeks, but the summer session is ending next week. I don’t know if the professor plans on grading the exam on his own again, but either way, it would be a … relief, in some sense, anyway.
I’ve been fantasizing about what I’d do when the summer session is over. I might re-subscribe to WSJ (or not; I’m still thinking about it; WSJ’s always had too much material for me to even skim through, even without the rigors of GSI’ing for a summer session). I might resume exercise routine (I’ve discontinued it for some time in the interest of what limited time I had during the week). Oh, and I might actually be able to take some of the weekends off—maybe for hiking near Lake Chabot again.
Well. Perhaps I shouldn’t count my chickens just yet, after all, I still have one set of review problems to come up with, two sets of homework to grade, and three sets of solutions to write.
And I only get 2 weeks of break, counting the welcome week as a “break”.