Discoveries in the Physics & Astronomy shop | Science, curiosities, and surprises
Four heavy-ish boxes of beads, all soda-lime glass in various sizes. 1 millimeter up to 4. Remnants of an old research project, untouched for years.
But it’s not like they go bad, not on a human timescale. So 60 lbs. of little glass beads, headed for storage, awaiting the day when they’re useful to someone or the space they’re occupying is more valuable for something else.
Anybody have ideas for an arts and crafts project?
Bins of old stuff, acquired because we might find some of it useful before it heads to the scrap heap. And we do, we really do.
But when it comes to unsorted bins of fasteners and other bits, loaded with so many sizes and threads and styles? Fills you with dread until you remember there’s a bin for scrap metal recycling.
Don’t put your fingers into a high-voltage electrical socket when the power is on. Don’t do it when the power is off, just in case.
It’s not even clear why someone would do this when the entire apparatus is unplugged.
Just don’t go sticking fingers into places not meant for fingers, please.
Rearranging the shop is no small task. Organizing it all is a complex nightmare. We’re forever behind the 8 ball, too.
But it’s hard to throw away perfectly good and useful stuff, given that you never know what projects will walk through the door.
With the right crystal structure, as with calcite (a form of good, old calcium carbonate), you get some neat effects. With a refractive index that varies depending on the polarization of the light passing through, a chunk of iceland spar is birefringent and causes a visual doubling effect of the objects seen beyond. How cool is that?
Sometimes you stumble across little gems, squirreled away in the back closets, like these illuminance meters, acquired in March of 1964. Sadly, no cost etched into the side. Eventually, these were replaced with more modern versions, before being phased out of labs entirely.
We can guess how they were used – being next to a box of slide frames with a rainbow of color filters – and assume they’re not making a comeback. But check out all of that tiny, mid-century text crammed on there!
Especially intrigued at the specific note about newsprint requiring twice the incident light of other reading, writing, and general tasks.
“To Reorder Please Call DEAD BATTERIES”
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice…
“Classroom door key.” Matter-of-fact, handwritten on a torn adhesive label. No need for building or specific room number identification. (The other side has no markings.)
Maybe there was only one classroom at the time? Maybe they were all keyed identically? Maybe the original bearer was only concerned with one specific classroom, one which needed no elaboration? Who knows?
If you let an ordinary rubber balloon age long enough, it might just shatter into pieces at the slightest touch.
Oh, right. Some days, you might forget that we share one of our storage spaces with the Theater & Dance department.