Own a Little Bit of Berkeley Physics History

Five foot slide rules? Brass and Wood balances? Bakelite Metering Equipment. This and more are up on the block as a result of UC Berkeley's physics department wanting to clear out old gear (they need the room). The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about auction. Apparantly, about 20 items will be auctioned in a "test the waters" sales this Sunday, and the balance of the 1000 pieces will be sold July 28th...

Comments

Expiration date?

[kaustik]

This is great... but I believe LSD loses its potency after sitting around in those dusty basements for so long...

Re:Why?

[Rasta Prefect]

Why did they have a five foot slide rule? Such an item would be utterly pointless.

It's a teaching aid. We used to have one in my high school, hanging in the room where I had Calculus.

Re:They just throw it out here

[muon1183]

I'm a Berkeley student and working at the labs here for the summer, and we do in fact throw most of the stuff out. However, things have to be accounted for before being discarded. However, the really old stuff is still sitting around. In fact, there's a really old particle accelerator sitting in one of the hallways in the physics building. I'm not sure if it still works, and it's dusty as hell, but it's pretty neat looking.

This .sig now open source

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear god people, the larger the slide rule the
more accurate it is. IE more decimal places

L and S keyboard cousins

[texchanchan]

Kear Lsalgkot Reaker,
Re, 'L' and 'S' aren't even remotely close to one another on the keyboard.
Lure they are. They're e.actly oqqosite each other, ohich makes them conceptually equivasent to the qart of your brain that ,an't uell left from right.

--ti.mg;vmg;v

Additional Coverage

[dragons_flight]

Contra Costa Times

UCB Campus News

I'm a UCB physics grad student. The primary motivation for the sale isn't to make money or make room for new gear. They actually have to do it because the part of the physics building is scheduled for a seismic retrofit, and the temporary building can't accommodate all the old stuff in the attics.

Some material will be kept for display and for gifts to retiring faculty.

Re:Whats a slide rule?

[Lars T.]

No. They were mainly used to multiply and divide using logarithms (by adding/substracting them). You have two rules with logarithmic scales on them, one of which you can slide against the other. When you want to multiply the numbers a and b, you line up the 1(.0) on the slide with the a on the fixed rule, and the result is on the fixed rule where b is on the slide. It works because log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b).