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Build Your Own Cyclotron
mindpixel writes "Physics Today is running a story about Tim Koeth's 12 inch cyclotron. Here's a quote that says it all: 'I was sitting in Tom Devlin's modern physics lecture. He described the principle of the cyclotron. He said it required a lot of RF power. I was--and am--a ham radio operator, so RF was no problem. It needed a big magnet; I knew I could find one of those. How tough could a vacuum system and chamber be?'"
No fair, I thought there would be instructions!
This goes to show you that you don't need megabucks to do good science! To many, half of science is the challenge, not the successes, but they are nice, of course [grin].
I don't see why this mind-set couldn't be used for teaching science and computers on the high school level....Find a company that is getting rid of their dozens of old Pentium II system, get them to donate them to the highschool, and build a Beowulf or OpenMosix cluster to allow HS students to learn the fundamentals of supercomputing environments. Get a local university to help teach them...and you now have a chance of producing better educated computer geeks...and the physics & chemistry geeks and run small simulations as well.
Just an idea...
ttyl
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Safety and Mercury are two terms that have only recently met. Around '76 in our suburban high school the physics instructor would bring out a plain old 6" wide glass jar (tin screw cap taped shut) half full of mercury and let each of us lift it a quarter inch off the counter to feel just how impossibly heavy a liquid could be.
Great demo, but jeeeze... just one kid goofs and that jar would'a cracked wide. The god who protects fools did overtime back then.
I hold people like Tim Koeth in higher regard than than any theoretical scientist anyday.
I was with you, up until this point. Why place someone with an experimentalist bent higher (or lower) than someone with a theoretical one. They are both important, and without one, the other could not exist.
I hold people who show intelligence, drive, and initiative in high regard, no matter what they choose to apply their interest to.
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Slightly different ;)
If by different, you mean craptacular, then yes I have...
When I was a kid watching it during its original airing, I thought it was awesome. Seeing it again a couple of years ago I realized it didn't age very well, and a lot of it just didn't make sense to begin with. I vastly prefer the remake, myself.
If that's the state of the art in 1930's nuclear technology, then we should have guys building fission warheads in their basements around 2015.
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