Free electron laser – A fourth-generation synchrotron light source [video]

>Bremstrellung (sp?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung

It would've been even better without the unnecessary political commentary.

I have a friend who worked on the construction of the CMS at CERN. Calibration, actually.

He has a similar ability to very clearly explain the technology and what it is trying to accomplish. And an innate curiosity or interest that causes him to learn that -- beyond just his specific technical area.

In other words, some engineers are very effective networkers and communicators.

When I stop to think about it, they have to be, to ever succeed in building such a large and complex device -- in the company and at the behest of so many other disciplines, both practical and theoretical.

P.S. I should add that he does this with everything that really interests him and/or that he is doing. It's not confined to one topic or things he formally works on.

P.P.S. This may be a "Captain Obvious" comment; nonetheless, the presentation reminded me of him.

And of how some comment science stereotypes really are far from the mark.

While the Nobel prize is indeed not awarded posthumously, the characterization of Rosalind Franklin being unfairly dispossessed of credit is very reasonable.

Watson and Crick achieved great fame for "Discovering the double helix structure of DNA". Their original paper:

1) contained no experimental data

2) does not cite Franklin

3) was based on her as-yet unpublished X-ray crystallography

Here's a collage of protein crystals grown in space in 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Protein_crystals_grown_in...

Your premise, while theoretically true, is not practicable in reality. To compute the realistic trajectory (more correctly: to estimate the probability of all the transitions between all the states to build up the PDF) would require multiple universe-lifetimes to calculate with enough accuracy to replace what an xFEL can tell you.

It's not just about building bigger computers. If it were, we would make that investment. If you look at the QED and QC calculations done on the world's largest supercomputers, they're not that inspiring.

The economy is just made of humans and equipment, which also obey the rules of QED. We should get rid of all these useless economists taking data and just simulate everything!

The main problem is scaling. In quantum chemistry, you need electron correlation to get accurate results (comparing your ab initio with experiments) and these methods scale quite badly. Somewhat state-of-the-art CCSD(T) (coupled cluster singles and doubles with triple excitations approximated by perturbation theory) scales formally as N^7, with N being the number of electrons in your system (somewhat simplified). Proteins are huge. Even with some of the newest nearly linear-scaling coupled-cluster methods (which utilize GPUs) running calculations on proteins takes extremely long time. And this is just electron correlation methods. We're still using the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, not taking all excitaions into account, using a finite size basis set, ignoring relativistic effects, not thinking about time evolution and (most of the time) not considering (explicit) solvent effects.

We are still a long way from modelling protein folding in solution with 100% quantum mechanics. Luckily, classical molecular dynamics are quite good at modelling biochemical systems (to a degree). There are a ton of errors that a much bigger than quantum (and relativistic) effects anyway.

The use of the laser by non-profit entities is free, but one must write quite the sophisticated (I'm assuming) proposal/experiment to be undertaken in order to actually be given permission to use it. The time and effort required there is of course not free.

wow, you folks hate jokes. It wasn't even an offensive one.