Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

The Experiment 111
No team of mountain climbers set to with more vigor than did
our little troupe. No expedition up the Orinoco was ever better prepared.
It was absolutely astounding how much stuff was in Brillig
and Norman’s second trunk, which up till now had not been
opened. Indeed, that they’d lugged it all this way I took as an extraordinary
gesture of faith.
Rachel blanched when she saw the cables.
“Where’s the main switch box?” asked Norman.
She recovered and showed the way.
While Norman busied himself with electrical connections, Brillig
and Arnold positioned a large tractor tire inner tube in the middle
of the basement floor. I inflated it with a bicycle pump they’d
brought. Together we built a four-foot square box out of plywood,
using two-inch blocks at the corners so the sides were a foot high,
and covered the bottom with a thin layer of carpet material. A piece
of wood was nailed along one edge of the box to hold the laser. We
centered the box on top of the inner tube and filled it with fine silica
sand to about two inches from the top.
“The more sand,” explained Norman, “the better the insulation
against vibration.”
Next we fashioned tubes of various sizes to hold the optical
com-ponents. These tubes were cut from black plastic waste pipe,
of the kind used by plumbers, two to four inches in diameter and
fourteen to eighteen inches long, with some larger ones to use as
extensions. Rachel set up a card table, on which she and Arnold
glued the various mirrors and lenses to corks, which were then fitted
snugly into the tops of the tubes.
Norman positioned the tubes firmly in the sand, with a running
commentary of what he was doing and why.
“The single ray of light from the laser will hit this partially silvered
piece of glass—the beam splitter—which divides the laser
beam into two. When the beam hits the glass, a small part of it will
be reflected off the front surface; the amount can be adjusted by
changing the angle of the glass to the light coming from the laser.
This is called the reference beam, which will be spread by this lens
and directed by this mirror to evenly cover the light-sensitive emulsion
on the holographic plate.