Ignorance isn't quite bliss but it's not all bad

Today was the first day back at work for me in 2018. And, aside from the sense of lightness and freedom I felt as I drove up the road after giving my bears a cheery wave through the window, it was not much different from many of my work days in 2017. Coffee, trying to remember what I was working on, catching up on the illnesses, bereavements, job opportunities and fashion decisions of my colleagues and their children, debating how to fix the growing wage gap between CEOs and underlings. Oh, and a spot of physics.

A tricky spot of physics.

A tricky spot of physics that has been an integral part of the instruments I've worked on for the past 12 years.

A tricky spot of physics that I don't really understand, but have nodded my way through for the past 12 years. Every now and then my boss discusses it with me in a manner that suggests he thinks I know more than I do, and I have a looming sense of dread that he's going to find out the depths of my ignorance any moment now.

Any moment now occurred today.

We've run into a bit of a problem on my current instrument, whereby it's not behaving like all the others we've ever built, and we're not entirely sure why. So four of us were thrashing out the problem round a hot whiteboard. Suggestion and counter-suggestion batted back and forth about dimensions, materials, voltages and currents that we could try modifying. And finally, I threw all caution to the winds, and piped up,

"Sorry, just stop there. When the plasma strikes, I don't really understand what's going on. What's happening at that edge?"

Did I get reprimanded? Did I get laughed at? Did I get disparaged?

I did not.

My boss grinned at me and shrugged.

"I don't know. I read the papers, discovered nobody else knew what they were doing and had a go at a design. Since it worked I've never had to try modifying it, and it's too hard to work out what's actually going on inside."

So there we go. Twelve years of fearing that I'd be found out for being ignorant, and it turns out, nobody else knows what we're doing either.

Which, come to think of it, is a bit of a pity, as we don't know what to change to try and make this particular one work. But it's OK, it's only a month late in shipping to the customer, and we've only got a handful of variables to try changing... length, diameter, aspect ratio, angle, separation, pressure, flow, gas species, voltage, current... it's hardly going to take any time to characterise and fix...

So we'll probably do what we always do... shove a capacitor in and hope that fixes it.