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A Vacuum Tube Is a Particle Accelerator You Can Hold in Your Hand
Pull a 6L6 out of its socket and hold it in your palm. Let it cool off first! Glass, a few wires, a small black box of nickel and mica inside. It looks like a piece of mid-century lab glassware. It is a piece of mid-century lab glassware. It's also, as far as I can tell, the same machine as the Large Hadron Collider. The 6L6 beam tetrode: a source of charged particles, a vacuum, an electric field across a gap, a pair of plates to aim the beam, and a target. Scale those i

Lowell Hunt
Aug 66 min read


Different Lives in the Same Amp
You can divide the electrons in an amplifier into three populations, sorted roughly by how interesting their lives are.

Lowell Hunt
May 256 min read
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