SMT007 Magazine

SMT007-Nov2019

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48 SMT007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2019 • Create simple and easy-to-understand project documentation • Test using independent people • Check with the customer after delivery to make sure everything works • Look for improvement opportunities • Check that the delivery of the expected benefits is on track • Document lessons learned from your projects • Kill failing projects quickly • Recognize small wins • Celebrate when the project is completed on time and within budget Embrace the Journey Once you initiate project management to address problems in the organization, make sure to continuously educate employees on the benefits of project management. The suc- cessful completion of a project is a win for the business, but the successful project man- agement journey is a culture change that will take your business to new levels of growth and improved profitability. SMT007 Reference 1. "The Future of Manufacturing: 2020 and Beyond," IndustryWeek. Alfred Macha is the president of AMT Partners. He can be reached at Alfred@amt-partners.com. To read past columns or contact Macha, click here. It has been four years since the first detection of grav- itational waves—those strange wobbles in spacetime caused when two massive objects in space collide. Find- ing that signal vindicated Einstein's century-old theory of general relativity, which says accelerating objects pro- duce curvatures in spacetime that propagate into waves. Since then, scientists have observed these signals doz- ens of times, rippling out from many different parts of the universe and caused by very different types of cosmic collisions. Here's how MAGIS-100 should work: atoms are cooled to a fraction above absolute zero (to keep them stable) and then dropped down a vacuum chamber housed within the shaft. A laser is pulsed down this chamber between atoms in free fall, and the time it takes for light to travel from one to the other is measured. Because light in a vacuum trav- els at a constant speed, this time should be precisely pre- dictable. Any delay would presumably be caused by sen- sitive external signals—gravitational waves or potentially something else. This is not altogether different from how conventional interferometers work. At its core, MAGIS-100 is sort of a shrunken-down version of the LIGO interferometers that made the first gravitational-wave detections in 2015. The difference is that LIGO uses mirrors stationed hundreds of kilometers apart instead of atoms. These mirrors are sus- ceptible to disturbances caused by perturbations in the ground, which makes it more difficult to discern actual signals from false "noise." In theory, a free-falling atom won't be affected in this way. Stanford University physicist Jason Hogan, one of the leads for the project, likens the technology behind MAGIS-100 to a hybrid of an interferometer and an atomic clock. "These atoms basically act like extremely good stopwatches that keep time on the propagation of light and look for fluctua- tions caused by other signals," he says. The hope is that a future, bigger version of MAGIS-100 will be able to pick up gravitational- wave events that fall outside the scope of the big projects such as LIGO or Virgo, which is based in Italy. (Source: MIT Technology Review) Frozen Atoms Could Help Us Learn More From Gravitational Waves

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