Discoveries in the Physics & Astronomy shop | Science, curiosities, and surprises
There are many, many reminders in a workshop to wear appropriate protective equipment, and the first time you watch a flying piece of material bounce off of your safety glasses, you’re ever so grateful. This one’s one of our favorites.
Yeah, when you see enough of them, you get opinions on label design quality.
Making an ‘X’ across your telescope’s eyepiece is a handy thing, letting you mark the center instead of eyeballing it. There are all sorts of reasons you might appreciate that little bit of assistance, provided it doesn’t actively interfere with seeing things. So you use as fine a wire as you can. Which is going to break, of course, so keep some spares in the desk drawer.
How thin? This is AWG 53, all of 0.0007 inches thick (0.0178 mm). Enough to make even the finest human hair seem chunky in comparison.
Our Observatory is the second on campus, a replacement for the 1887 original. That one was constructed to house our antique Clark refractor telescope, an early gift from William Bucknell, because it’s really not the sort of instrument you set up on the front lawn when the skies are looking decent.
Here we see the building’s layout as of June, 1959, presumably as discussions were underway regarding the renovations that would begin in 1962. During which one of these walls would collapse, necessitating a relatively hasty pivot to create the current Observatory to maintain the astronomy program. (We’re very grateful for that, sixty years later.)
Should we expect restrooms in an 1889 structure? Which way is north? Did the individual drafting up these plans just not like drawing doors? What’s that unlabeled space “south” of the office? When transitioning a class from the classroom to the observation dome upstairs, do you lead the students through your office or make them go outside? So many questions.
There are a handful of occupations and/or hobbies which reward those interested in the craft of knot-tying. The big ones include boating, camping, climbing, and fishing. (There may be hobby overlap.) Arborists, equestrians, and surgeons need specific, functional knots, too.
Turns out so do lab technicians.
We’re slowly adding knots to our repertoire, for all manner of purposes. Pictured above: a doubled-up double overhand stopper. (A single knot was insufficiently stopper-ing given the thread diameter and pendulum bobs on hand.) Alpine butterflies, bowlines, non-slip mono loops, trucker’s hitches. Now we just want an excuse to use the Double Dragon Loop!
Thanksgiving break is nearly upon us, and the student body is desperate to extend their week-long break into something even longer. But classes are still in session! There are still amazing and exciting things to learn!
And we have toys to give away!
Annual tradition to encourage our introductory physics to stick around: problem session prizes. Puzzle games, fidget spinners, stretchy rubber toys, and some other unidentifiable plastic oddities that came in the variety packs. It’s a literal grab-bag of eye-searingly bright toys.
Have a happy Thanksgiving break!
An electronic buzzer buried inside a foam ball, on a long cable with a switch and handle at the end. Flick the switch, and a piercing 2,500 Hz signal begins. Whirled in a big circle around your own head, the tone persists. For everyone else in the room, it creates a cyclic Doppler shift, a repeating weeee-oooo, weeee-oooo that sticks in the brain even after it’s done, like when you see phosphene images behind your eyelids after catching a glimpse of something way too bright.
We can’t overstate the wonderful modifications to the original object, back in 2010, which added the cable and switch. Your bog-standard Doppler ball – available from several scientific apparatus purveyors – requires one to open up the ball, turn on the buzzer, then close it back up. Tossing it back and forth between students illustrates the concept.
Then, when you’ve had quite enough and just want it to stop, you have to pry it open and shut the whole thing off. (This vintage version, pre-mod, required full-on battery removal.) The Doppler ball: it teaches us all kinds of new lessons!
There are endless options for measuring sizes, and we use different tools for different purposes. Rulers, meter sticks, tape measures? Check. Vernier calipers, both mechanical and digital? Check. Precision micrometers? Check.
Counting twelve-inch floor tiles? Check.
Precision matters, as does scale. A tape measure is helpful when moving furniture, even if it can’t determine the thickness of a sheet of paper like a micrometer can. Micrometers: really useless for determining if that new cabinet’s going to fit beside the CNC machine.
These Mitutoyo dial calipers – good for up to 12 inches in 0.001-inch increments – are kind of like a super-precise ruler. They’re in decimal inches, not metric, which makes them ideal for use with our lathe: also inch-only. (The calipers are more precise, so you know when you’re off by 0.003 inches.)
Not that we need that level of precision machining every day. But it’s good to know the option’s on the table.
Our wonderful Clark refracting telescope support column, in all its masonry glory. Structurally isolated from the rest of the building so that footsteps don’t cause wobbles in the telescope’s field of view.
Sometimes, it’s the little things.
From the days before planetarium software was readily available, we have an intense glut of celestial globes, which show the positions of the stars and constellations on the night sky. Also the day sky, of course, but unless you’re watching a total solar eclipse they get lost in the bright blue light scattered by our atmosphere. They get little use except as office decorations.
We have two Earth globes – one is a giant, inflatable beach ball – which still get regular use in Astronomy classes. Unsurprisingly, visualizing the movement of an Earthbound observer on a tilted, rotating, orbiting planet around the sun isn’t always intuitive. Having a mini-Earth to look at helps immensely.
We also have a very nice lunar globe, which really should see more use. It’s highly detailed, including on the side of the moon that only a handful of humans have ever seen. (More craters, fewer mare.) If you dig maps, it’s a very cool map.
And when did this charming item come into being? 1969, of course.
S’mores! Pretty much everyone likes s’mores, and they’re a great excuse to get outside and be social. And to make a cozy fire on an October evening.
Of course, if you also attempt to do this with physicists, the discussion is bound to turn to fluid turbulence and vortices and all of that…
In case you were wondering: there is a version of this which involves watching the fluid flow with lasers, because of course they have another way to play with lasers…