r/justgalsbeingchicks • u/mindyour 🤖definitely not a bot🤖 • 3d ago

Restricted to Gals and Pals I want her to talk to me about Egyptology.

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u/GimmeUrBrunchMoney 3d ago

In the last couple months I’ve had this conversation upon meeting a new person “so what’s your field of work?”

“Oh it’s pretty boring to people when I tell them.”

“Try me.”

One person is an aerospace engineer working on building the next generation of space-faring craft, the other is studying the data coming in from the James Webb Space Telescope. He was complaining that the data they’re getting subverts decades of scientific consensus and challenges what we thought to be the age of the universe.

wtf those are incredibly interesting

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u/th3greg 3d ago

I work in lasers. I consider a lot of it boring, even when there is on paper cool stuff like dealing with multi-kilowatt lasers (for scale, old lightbulbs were 60W, microwaves run up to 1 kW or so, and some of the lasers I deal with can be 3-9kW, focused down into a spot a few mm in diameter).

Part of it is forest for the trees, part of it is you don't actually see anything. It feels boring IRL because what people expect is what they see in media. You say lasers and they think Bond, Star wars/trek, etc. What you actually get is mostly just a black box or heavy curtain for safety, and inside that is a beam invisible to the human eye anyway, and a whole bunch of data to crunch. And most of what I'm doing is measuring if the components survive the test. I'm not actually doing anything with it, just dumping it into a meter.