Discoveries in the Physics & Astronomy shop | Science, curiosities, and surprises
There are thunderstorms outside, but we need to do a tent check. Do we have all the pieces? Will everything fit inside as planned? If it’s necessary to set this up outdoors during an actual rainstorm, have we done our practice run?
Pick the largest and least occupied space in the building and get to work. If anyone asks, you’re doing this for science! (Technically true.)
Sometimes you find oddities whose initial and continued existence boggles the mind. This clock was gathering dust atop the bookcases in the student lounge, battery-free and long-forgotten.
Where did it come from? What life did it live before it came to Olin? Who thought enough of it to acquire, but not enough to take with them?
What should we do with it now?
If it still works, it stays in service. There’s always a bit of “what’s this?” and “what’s it do?” and “how do I make it do what it does?” when stumbling across old equipment, but that’s what we have physicists for.
LEDs can do some excellent things, primarily generating a lot of photons for very little power input, with the opportunity to have a fine degree of control over the details. Optically, though, they need a little help.
Fortunately, for our undergraduate labs in need of an adjustable light source, a spherical glass lens and an adjustable housing collimate them well enough. Which, when you need to build a lab’s worth of these things, makes life in the basement a whole lot simpler.