Stealing Light

Apr 22

April 22

I’m obsessed with photosynthetic pigments.

To learn more, I fell under the spell of Ron Koder’s enthusiasm for the Eastern Regional Photosynthesis Conference and submitted an Art Abstract to a Science Conference. My abstract was accepted; my presentation was 9pm on a Saturday Night! My kind of partiers!

I drove Ron and his grad student Giovanni to the Marine Biological Labs in Woods Hole, MA (we took a ferry across Long Island Sound).

Of course all the talks were way over my head -lots of physics- I was scribbling acronyms from the first slide to retain the tiniest orientation and basically just surfed over the remainder of each talk. It reminded me of my first year of undergrad, sitting in on Seminar at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh -listening to !Scientists!- thinking I was never going to make it as one. Tho this time, I knew it was the first taste of a neat language. By the end, I could make it through the 5th slide of talks; I was learning.

Here is the slide that expands 2 previous figures I had found, but more beautifully. Sadly, I forget who was talking and can’t provide proper attribution. But this is where I am trying to head!. Look how energetic those Near Infrared photons are!