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marleyx.com/2023/

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I saw a living brain under the microscope for the first time. I'll never forget that moment, because it's where it really struck me that our minds are made of neurons. So messy, sprawling, and far removed from our own length and timescale that I felt a twinge of despair. To image at the scale of neurons, we have a slew of exotic objects. Proteins with specific geometries to couple voltage to light reemission. We have femtosecond lasers, whose bursts of light are the fastest events humans can generate. The laser sits in a two-by-four-feet box and is truly a love letter to electromagnetism and human engineering. It has no moving parts, but relies on a clever arrangement of materials in a cavity to encourage overlapping standing waves phased to sculpt out femtosecond (10^-15 s) bursts. A laser is more cello than computer If nothing else, the lab was a stimulating place. I got to know a ton of new objects. Being in the lab could induce a unique state of constant problem-solving, which is v

This is part of a year-end anthology I spent 2023 at a lab at Harvard. It was my first time engaging with the institution of science. I saw a living brain under the microscope for the first time. I'll never forget that moment, because it's where it really struck me that our minds are made of neurons. So messy, sprawling, and far removed from our own length and timescale that I felt a twinge of despair. To image at the scale of neurons, we have a slew of exotic objects. Proteins with specific geometries to couple voltage to light reemission. We have femtosecond lasers, whose bursts of…

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