TED Community » Ulla Vainio

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I'm passionate about

encouraging more girls to study physics.

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• A reply on Conversation: What could one do with an x-ray laser?

  Feb 16 2011: You are right. I just threw the number out my hat based on my gut feeling and was hoping to come back and correct it today before anybody reads it once I realized that it was overestimated quite a bit.. More reasonable estimate is actually around 300 000 dollars per day. Per hour that would be then around 12 000 dollars. But, actually, since the machine is not operated every day (like Christmas), the costs per day are higher. Anyway, my gut feeling was off by a factor of ten. But if you then add to this the actual technical equipment needed for the experiment and also the personnel who do the experiment, I believe for most experiments the costs are higher.
  
  The estimate here is based on the yearly operation cost estimate of European XFEL.
  
  For comparison, at a synchrotron one pays 300 - 3000 euros per hour for measurement time, depending on the synchrotron.

• A comment on Conversation: What could one do with an x-ray laser?

  Feb 15 2011: I forgot to mention that one hour on such a machine costs maybe around 100 000 dollars or so. This is good to keep in mind when thinking about non-scientific or commercial applications.

• A comment on Conversation: What does it mean to be authentic?

  Feb 15 2011: Maybe authenticity is actually the product of the mind of the perceiver. When we see somebody showing the emotions we expect them to have in that situation, we see them as authentic. On the other hand, if we expected somebody to cry for example, and they don't, we think they are fake, not showing their feelings. While actually, it might just be that they are simply different from us. Why some people appear authentic to more people than others? Perhaps, because they behave in a way that appeals to more people. (Which might not actually be the behavior that is expected from people as a norm, but something that is appeals to them. Something that they would also do if they hadn't been taught away from it.)
  
  Well, this was just this kind of theory invented after a minute of thinking. Perhaps not worth going deeper into.