A long time ago, when Jessica first left home to work on her doctorate degree at Princeton’s Plasma Physics lab, she asked her daddy what he wanted for his birthday. He said, “A model of MRX.” I think he probably said that flippantly because he never knows what he wants for a present and because he always wants to know what his daughter is up to.
This is what he got:
(MRX, you see, stands for “Magnetic Reconnection Experiment”. This was a little science experiment Jessica worked on at PPPL examining magnetic field lines in plasmas. This, alas, is the most I can intelligently say about it).
Daddy loved this birthday present. It’s been sitting on a shelf above his work desk since 2007, and now that he’s retiring, he brought it home.
(I’m trying to remember why the little physicist has pink hair. Must have been a phase.)
Jim says he wants to display the Little Physicist and Her MRX here, on a shelf near his desk, “for a while, and then we can put it away, carefully.”
Someday maybe our grandchildren will wonder if all physicist ladies have pink hair, or if the funny machine makes scientists’ hairs turn pink, or if their mommy was always such a great play-doh sculptor.
Yep. She was.