The most genius I’ve ever felt was when I was working in the physics lab. We had installed a camera at a pressure chamber window so we could watch a laser do pulse ablation on a metal plate. However, we had a problem no one could figure out; the laser would phase in and out on our live feed from the camera. The team was freaking out about the possibility of this 30k laser being defective and they were about to take apart the vacuum chamber when I was like “uh... guys? We’re firing the laser at 23 pulses per second.”

Mind you, I’m a sophomore at this point, working with 3 grad students and a professor. I’m at a point in my career where I can barely explain the math behind what research I’m actually doing.

The professor is like “.... Yeah? What about it?” And I explain: “Most cameras film at 24 frames per second. The laser looks like it’s phasing in and out because it’s out of phase with the camera” so we adjusted the pulse per second a bit until it was in phase and shockingly! It worked perfectly. The prof and the grad students just looked.. dumbfounded? And I guess camera fps rates aren’t common knowledge, at least to them. They treated me like I was the smartest person in the room even though the only reason I knew that information was from making gifsets of Pacific Rim when I was in high school