That this imaginary thing is what allows us to use light to differentiate one mineral from another under the microscope. His voice is reaching a fevered pitch, and he is explaining that this thing both exists and does not exist inside of every mineral.
#Mytracks uoregon series#
"This is the acute bisectrix." What did he just say? A cute bi what? What is he talking about? On the chalkboard he has drawn an ellipse with a series of lines tracing through and around it. Professor Johnston's voice cuts back through my thoughts.
#Mytracks uoregon Patch#
We would stand out of the rain on the little patch of decorated concrete, which looked more like an afterthought than any kind of real public art. It was a shortcut to the other science buildings and a gathering place where we would meet before heading to lunch or to study, or after exams. I usually locked my bike outside the main office, one of the few covered bike racks not always full, the Cascade breezeway being unnoticed and underutilized. For us, it means hours and hours in the student lab and countless treks from the Science Library, through the Cascade courtyard with its odd rock art and cryptic concrete engravings, and into Columbia. Optical mineralogy involves exactly the same task, though now the goal is to identify said minerals in thin sections using microscopes with polarized light. Our mastery of this information was tested with the dark humor typical of the fifth-year graduate students who taught the class: a lab exam consisting of the identification of 20 nearly identical green and black minerals in hand sample. Optical mineralogy is the grim follow-up to the lesser intro to mineralogy, the geological equivalent of gross anatomy, in which the name, chemical formula, and 10 most distinguishing features of some 150-odd minerals are memorized. We are smack in the middle of it, trapped with one another in almost all of our classes: chemistry, calculus, and here, in optical mineralogy. There are 20 of us here, trying to survive the weeder year of the geology major. Not just mine, and not all just due to lack of understanding-the material is, regardless of one's passion for the field, unbearably tedious, and despite his energetic cheerleading and the true usefulness of the information, incredibly boring. He is trying to get us to visualize this. He has been trying for the last 60 minutes, and in fact the last five weeks, to get us to understand how light is reflected and refracted against and through the molecular framework of minerals. He is tall and thin, and capable of drawing almost anything in three dimensions, which he has done, all over the board. Similarly, sweat is pouring down the face of our professor, then department head Dana Johnston.
![mytracks uoregon mytracks uoregon](https://www.psymusic.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/cropped-Space-Connection.png)
I am in a second-floor classroom of Cascade Hall staring blankly at the chalkboard. It is 1:00 in the afternoon on a Wednesday.