Science Festival Fun · 4:26pm Jun 23rd, 2016

This weekend I will be running a Particle Physics themed stall at the Oxfordshire Science Festival, and thus busy trying to grab the attention of any passing civilians in order to enthuse to them about how awesome fundamental physics is. This requires a fair amount of organisation, so I am now in triple-check-the-checklist-to-make-sure-we-didn't-miss-anything-when-we-double-checked-the-checklist mode. To start, we need certain ~~toys~~ professional equipment:

- Cloud Chamber – a small container filled with a bit of isopropanol. Cooled so it creates a super-saturated vapour layer, so when a cosmic ray or other particle passes through it makes a line of tiny droplets. Must remember to pick up the ice on Saturday morning.

- Silicon Detector. This is the modern digital-camera version of the last one. But instead of having to peer closely at a faintly illuminated volume waiting for a glimpse of transitory line of droplets, you can just watch the picture appearing on a laptop screen. Not quite so exciting, but rather more up-to-date technology.

- Build Your Own Universe Lego. The yellow bricks are the up quarks, the red ones are the down quarks. All the Universe is made of elementary building blocks, so we can start off making the proton and neutron, then move on to deuterium, helium and heavier elements…

- Particle Zoo toys. The entire Standard Model of Particle Physics in plushie form. So make friends with a charm or strange quark, or try to recreate a mid-air proton-proton collision. Unfortunately someone has walked off with the Higgs Boson so I need to find it. The eyes have fallen off the tau and anti-muon... and the tachyon (but that’s not real anyway).

If anyone lives near Oxford (the one in England, not the one in Mississippi) and wants a fun day out, do come along. There is a lot going on. Some ticketed events, but also lots of free stalls on the streets and in the town hall. The weather forecast is not looking good, but hopefully the post referendum despair, chaos, and economic collapse will hold off, at least until Monday.

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Booster Spice

Booster Spice #1 · Jun 23rd, 2016 · · ·

I miss the good old days when the teacher in teh physics lab at school would build a cloud chamber in front of us. Then use a sock and the CO2 fire extinguisher to make the dry ice to cool it, then open the lead box containing the school radiation sources, because this was before the ready availability of the same source in the common cheap smoke alarm.

Maybe a table with magnets and ball bearings, like pinball, but the game is to ballistic the marble round the magnet into the target?

Or pull out the really old Dudeney Collection, like the shove hapenny where the odds of winning are 1/pi?

Laser pen and carboard sheets to make interfeerence patterns? Where to get the plastic A4 magnifier though for making things more compact, and maybe even try and demonstrate with a ballpoint pen telescope how you can cause an intereference pattern to collapse by observation, but its too small?

Or use a Bluetooth node as a microwave source for intereference pattern generator, after checking if the mains testing screwdriver with microwave oven leak detector is sensitive enough to light up along the pattern? Or even the headphones, so they lose and regain the signal due to interference, showing why your router positioning at home is so important etc?

Sorry Ic ant think of anything, Im not very good at the imagination thing.