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?'"

Comments

Excellent story!

[farrellj]

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