Thirty years ago I remember my friend Tony coming to one of our astronomy club meetings and saying he didn't know what he was going to do. The company he worked for went out of business and he didn't know what to do. What he did do, was open his own optical coating company 30 years ago and he has done really well with it. He is a brilliant guy and has built a number of vacuum coating machines by himself. He does work for astronomical observatories and a lens he coated is on one of the Mars rovers! So on Saturday he held an anniversary gathering inviting friends and people he does business with. We had lunch and then he had a number of amazing speakers during the afternoon.
What was wonderful was that Tony's mother was there and his daughter and grand daughter. Tony's mom and dad supported him as a teenager when he first got interested in astronomy, and first started building telescopes.
One of the speakers was the head of the astronomy department at one of the local colleges and she talked about her research.
Another speaker, at left, is with a company that is making new virtual reality glasses. Here he talks about them as one of the guests wears a pair of the glasses to see what they are like.
This woman is an engineer at Brookhaven National Lab and talked is about her work involving Quantum Mechanics, and quantum computing and quantum networking. This talk made my head spin but was really informative. What a day! What a way to celebrate 30 years in business.
This is fantastic and so different! What a great idea to have other businesses come in to explain what they do plus speakers that explained their areas of research. Like you said, your head must have been spinning! Betsey
ReplyDeleteJustine Haupt is the Scientist from BNL. She is also on the board at Custer and runs the Radio Astronomy program there. She is a serious hardware engineer. Take a look at her website - http://www.justine-haupt.com
ReplyDeleteJustine is a really lovely person to talk to and is very engaging.
Mark