Lowell Hunt

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 ingredients up by...

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