Discoveries in the Physics & Astronomy shop | Science, curiosities, and surprises
The spring semester PHYS 212 course starts with electrostatics, and what could be more entertaining than a Van de Graaff generator? A whirring rubber belt on two different rollers – one acrylic, the other covered in dense wool – builds up an electric charge on the anodized aluminum dome. The air positively crackles, and the discharge arcs look pretty great in a dark room.
Plus, it makes your skin feel all weird if you get close but not too close.
When learning about the laws of Ohm and Kirchhoff, it helps to have some hands-on experimentation, wiring together batteries and resistors and tiny little incandescent bulbs. Try it, see what happens, measure your voltage and current. Simple enough, yet more satisfying and memorable than just drawing squiggles on paper.
Plus, you get to open and close the switch like a tiny Frederick Frankenstein! Just try to resist the urge to shout out “My Creation Lives!” too loudly.
‘Tis the season for toy kits once more, full of little odds and ends to explore the basic principles of physics. Among them, the humble magnetic compass.
Works with the Earth’s magnetic field, permanent magnets (included in the kit), and even a homemade electromagnet (included in the kit, some assembly required).
Adorably tiny and not ideal for navigation. Please don’t entrust your wilderness survival to these.
The drinking bird, our unofficial department mascot. Even when one takes a tumble – and when it comes to glass bird versus floor, the floor always wins – there’s a great deal of respect for our top-hatted friends.
Kind of surprised someone hasn’t made up T-shirts yet, to be honest.
Welcome back, spring semester!
What to do when a battery-powered device would function better with fewer batteries? In our case, a dead-simple DC motor that gives better results when operating at 4.5 V instead of 6 V – but the holder that completes the circuit is sized for four AA batteries.
The answer: a battery-shaped slug of aluminum, which happily conducts current, fits in the place of a functional battery, and has some adorable bright-yellow heat-shrink tubing to stand out! Mostly because bright colors are easier to identify when you drop something on the floor. Round things have a habit of rolling off of surfaces at inopportune times.
There are many tools for communicating new ideas, including candy. Boxes upon boxes of candy intended for consumption in other countries, apparently.
Ah, physics. Where we have an eclectic assortment of desk toys and mostly-useless gimmicky trinkets because their very nature, the quirks of physics they embody, are helpful explainers of scientific principles.
And while their appeal is typically short-lived – how many times before the levitating magnet loses its novelty? – that ooh! factor only needs to work the first time.
One of the key benefits of a 3D printer is the ability to create prototypes rapidly. Doesn’t quite fit? Adjust the model, re-slice, and set the new print to go. When you’re down to sub-millimeter tweaks with each iteration, it’s a relief to let the machine whir and ooze out the next version.
If at first you don’t succeed, try again and again and again and again…
A collection of advertisements in the latest package of toys for our toy kits. The new catalog – buy even more of our stuff! – makes sense. The Doordash bit seems unrelated, but they’re probably just spraying everywhere and hoping for a connection.
But “burial insurance you can afford” seems… a step too weird? There’s an awful lot to unpack here, and to be honest, we’ve got more important work to do.
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.)