MacGyver Physics

counterfriction writes "This month's issue of Symmetry, a magazine jointly published by SLAC and Fermilab, is featuring an article that points out the sometimes extemporaneous and unconventional solutions physicists have come up with in (and out of) the laboratory. From the article: 'Leon Lederman ... used a pocket knife, tape, and items on anyone's grocery list to confirm that interactions involving the weak force do now show perfect mirror symmetry, or parity, as scientists had long assumed.'"

Comments

List of problems solved.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_problems_solv ed_by_MacGyver

Re:The original hardware store experiment

[ookabooka]

Or has it?

Ever wonder why the cat doesn't count as an observer? What does it feel like to be alive and dead at the same time? Do you have to have a soul to observe life or death?

My schtick

[stox]

When repairing some of the main computing systems, at Fermilab, I would joke that I needed a rubber chicken to repair the problem quickly, otherwise it would take a few hours. The one Christmas, one of the Ops staff bought me a pair of them. From then on, the joke was, when called at 3AM in the morning, did I have my chickens handy?

Re:The original hardware store experiment

[SocialWorm]

...or at least I tried to, and the link even appeared in the preview, but somehow it got eaten: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide

Re:Changes over time?

[kevinadi]

From the TFA:

Intrigued by the experiments of Madame Chien-Shiung Wu, Lederman called his friend, Richard Garwin, to propose an experiment that would detect parity violation in the decay of the pi meson particle. That evening in January 1957, Lederman and Garwin raced to Columbia's Nevis laboratory and immediately began rearranging a graduate student's experiment into one they could use. "It was 6 p.m. on a Friday, and without explanation, we took the student's experiment apart," Lederman later recalled in an interview. "He started crying, as he should have."

Great mind, horrible human being.

Of course there's always Dick Feynman...

[jpellino]

... at the Rogers Commission hearings.
C-clamp: $1.79
Styrofoam cup of ice water: $.50
Watching the expressions on the faces of NASA scientists who had inconclusive data from millions of dollars of testing? Priceless.

Also he allegedly was the only person to see the Trinity blast - as he figured the auto windshield glass would protect him from the UV, just as long as he ducked before the blast wave hit the glass.

Plus the one about Enrico Fermi at Trinity: he put some pieces of paper on the ground, scraped their start and finish positions in the sand with his toe, and based on the distance moved, the paper mass, and the distance to the blast, estimated the yield pretty darn close for that method.

Re:Changes over time?

[dasunt]

There is a beautiful essay by Feynman about the classical rats-in-a-maze experiment, and how the scientist discovered that he had to change many conditions of the maze before the rats would learn how to run the maze themselves, instead of relying on other navigational information.

Feynman also comments that this scientist's work with rats was more or less completely ignored, and the rest of the field continued to run their rats-in-a-maze experiments the traditional old-fashioned way.