Discoveries in the Physics & Astronomy shop | Science, curiosities, and surprises
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.
Sometimes you stumble across a delightful artifact. One with an unknown, perhaps unknowable history. Clearly, at one point, it was necessary to hold an object in a particular place, and none of the available clips, clamps, or clasps were up to the task.
A steel rod, an alligator clip, and some electrical tape to the rescue!
What’s fascinating about this isn’t the specifics of the object, but the way that these temporary, stopgap solutions can linger. After enough time and use, they become ordinary and unremarkable. Familiar.
Until, some indefinite period of years later, a fresh set of eyes spots them in an old drawer. Look at what’s in here!
These are not flashbulbs, merely incandescent A-lamps, but check out the sweet vintage ad!
So the “blue dot” thing was a quality indicator that Sylvania used in their classic flashbulbs. A magnesium filament inside an oxygen environment within the bulb produced a bright flash of light, assuming the envelope hadn’t been compromised. A dot of anhydrous cobalt (II) chloride inside that zero-moisture bulb would remain blue. If there was a leak, atmospheric moisture would react with the cobalt chloride to turn it pink, an indicator that this bulb might not work.
What’s less clear is how, exactly, one wee flashbulb is going to effectively illuminate that whale – flash photography being not super effective at distance – but whatever.