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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.'"
to confirm that interactions involving the weak force do now show perfect mirror symmetry, or parity,
As compared to last week, when they didn't.
-- Alastair
...chewing gum wrapper?! Everybody knows that MacGuyver would use a chewing gum wrapper!
So, I'm watching Doctor Who and someone asks, "Who is this guy?" and the reply's always the same, "He's the Doctor."
So I think to myself, "How does this guy always get out of these crazy situations?
"He's like some time-traveling MacGyver," I think to myself as I switch over to trusty, old Slashdot, only to see that same name right off.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Isn't about time some one confirmed the cat, box and pistol experiment? Schrödinger Cat has been living on borrowed time long enough.
I once used spaghetti, vaseline, plastic wrap, and an ovaltine jar to make a synthetic pussy. But you don't see me bragging about it.
The real trick is to do it with duct tape and baling wire.
volume 03 issue 08/09 oct/nov 06
Masters of Improv
Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab
World-class detective Angus MacGyver of the hit 1980s television show MacGyver could jury-rig almost anything with duct tape and a pocket knife. High-energy physics labs demand as much and more from technicians and engineers, relying on their creativity and intelligence to navigate technical quagmires. And when a problem demands it, they deliver--engineering tiny cameras mounted on bocce balls that snake through 10,000 feet of steel piping; rigging a 13-ton cement block to bash deformed brass into shape; or aiming a high-powered laser around corners to unblock water lines. Unlike MacGyver's fixes--such as the fuse he repaired with a chewing-gum wrapper--some of these devices last.
An improvised grinder
An improvised grinder sanded welds along the long, straight sections of 10,000 feet of pipe at Fermilab. The sander within the rotating silver cylinder cleaned each weld.
Photo: Fred Ullrich, Fermilab
Leon Lederman, the Nobel Prize-winning former director of Fermilab, is a legendary lab MacGyver. He used a pocket knife, tape, and items on anyone's grocery list to confirm that interactions involving the weak force do not show perfect mirror symmetry, or parity, as scientists had long assumed. Just as a watch hand always sweeps clockwise, nuclei of atoms eject electrons in a preferred direction as they decay, rather than spraying them randomly. The technical term for this is "parity violation."
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."
The men knew they were onto something big. "We had an idea and we wanted to make it work as quickly as we could--we didn't look at niceties," Lederman said. And, indeed, niceties were overlooked. A coffee can supported a wooden cutting board, on which rested a Lucite cylinder cut from an orange juice bottle. A can of Coca-Cola propped up a device for counting electron emissions, and Scotch tape held it all together.
"Without the Swiss Army Knife, we would've been hopeless," Lederman said. "That was our primary tool."
Their first attempt, at 2 a.m., showed parity violation the instant before the Lucite cylinder--wrapped with wires to generate the magnetic field--melted.
"We had the effect, but it went away when the instrument broke," Lederman said. "We spent hours and hours fixing and rearranging the experiment. In due course, we got the thing going, we got the effect back, and it was an enormous effect. By six o'clock in the morning, we were able to call people and tell them that the laws of parity violate mirror symmetry," confirming the results of experiments led by Wu at Columbia University the month before.
Another giant figure in physics, founding Fermilab director Robert Wilson, is the hero of a widely circulated tale.
MacGyver-mania
MacGyver aired in more than 40 countries between 1985 and 1992, in some cases leaving a lasting imprint on the local language. In South Korea, for instance, call a knife a "Maekgaibeo kal" and people know you mean the Swiss Army-type knife the TV character carried. Malaysians call their pocket knives "Pisau MacGyvers" or just plain "MacGyver knives." In Norway and parts of Finland, duct tape is sometimes called "MacGyver tape."
Ernie Malamud, a physicist at Fermilab, remembers working with Wilson during his graduate studies at Cornell. The pair wanted to use helium gas, often used to fill balloons, to locate a leak in the glass vacuum chamber; but they discovered the hose from the
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_problems_solv ed_by_MacGyver
Hey I love MacGyver. I watched it as a kid and now I watch the DVDs with my fiancee who has fond memories of watching the show with her grandmother as a kid. However that doesn't stop me wincing at how bad the physics (and all the science is) in that show. Anyway it's not MacGyver physics unless there's a baddie waiting in the wings to kill MacGyver and the "experiment" foils their plan to do so, preferably causing the bad guy to fall flat on his ass or be blown up.
Seriously though. Why associate ingenuity with a tv show (even if it's a good one)? It's like describing math breakthroughs as "reminiscent of the TV show 'Numbers'". These shows are inspired by the real science more than they inspire it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Patty & Selma: "Love me, love MacGyver."
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
s/now/not/
Though I like the parent's suggestion better . . .
Since when was some poor student's experiment on people's weekly grocery list. Yes they used everyday items to modify the experiment which they took apart (causing the student to cry but apparently they weren't interested in "niceties").
Just like MacGyver. Look how MacGvyer creates a nuclear reaction with just this hammer, chisel, coke bottle, string, 300mL of acetone....oh and a nuclear reactor.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Dear MacGyver-
Enclosed is a rubber band, a paper clip, and a drinking straw. Please save my dog.
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?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I always knew it was MacGyver physics that made the Stargate work!
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Alright, I couldn't resist. SOMEBODY had to do it.
(warning: rated PG-13)
Episode 1
Episode 2
...when something like this is modded "informative"...
Tells you something about the audience.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't know if this is mentioned in the article above (which appears to be slashdotted) but here's a scientist showing the force of gravity by creating a torsion balance using a ladder, fishing line and a few extras including two boules. (Yes, they're spelled 'boules')
Bending spacetime in the basement"
Check out the timelapse movies at the bottom of the page to see gravity in action.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
The name of Lederman's graduate assistant was Marcel Weinrich, which Lederman does credit as working with him on the project. Lederman, Garwin and Weinrich are all on the paper confirming the results on parity violation.
They didn't destroy the work of a person, they destroyed the work of a graduate student. There's a difference.
... 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.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
We had Bob Tinker (founder of TERC & Concord Consortium) on our interactive satellite science telecast back in the late 80s.
He was demo-ing some of the bank street labs software, including the graphical sound scope on the Apple ][.
He did with a caller on the air, and when he recorded, we got some feedback from the open phone audio.
Bob quickly realized that the echo was going up to the bird, back down to the caller, and thru the phone lines. Hmmmm.
He quickly changed gears, told the caller to stay on the phone, and did some single claps to get a distinct spike on the sound recorder.
Freeze the screen, some quick metrics on the screen, carry the 7 - and voila! Speed of light +/- 10%
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
It should be noted that parity is preserved; it just turns out that the opposite version occurs in anti-matter.
No that just means that parity is broken oppositely for matter and anti-matter. If you are refering to the combined symmetry i.e. doing a parity inversion followed by switching all matter from anti-matter then this is know as CP symmetry (C=charge conjugation [matter <-> antimatter] and P=parity).
Fortunately the CP symmetry is broken too but the effect is a lot smaller than parity violation. This CP violation allows us to unambiguously differentiate between matter and anti-matter which is useful if we ever get visted by aliens because we'd like to know whether they are made of anti-matter or not before they set foot on the planet! Of course nature already seems to have used CP violation to solve the problem for use: astronomers can find no evidence of any significant anti-matter in the universe which means that early on in the Big Bang CP violation must have caused more matter than anti-matter to be created and what we are is the leftover matter (in fact it is one of the Sakharov conditions for the Big Bang). The exact mechanism of ho this happened is unknown but if we find CP violation with neutrino mixing (so far we only see it in quark mixing) then we may be able to explain it.