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Physics Experiments To Inspire Undergraduates?
PShardlow writes "I have recently been asked to propose two projects for a 1st year undergraduate teaching laboratory in the summer term this year. These are projects that a pair of students will spend 36 hours working on, and as such can be quite in-depth. A good project would include something they can build, something they can measure, and something they can calculate. Previous projects have included cloud chambers, a Jacobs ladder, a laser Doppler speed camera, laser sound detection, smoke rings, and physical random number generators. This is an opportunity to really inspire students into the joy that can be experimental physics — but it only works if we demonstrators propose interesting projects. So I ask the Slashdot community for suggestions of fascinating projects to do, things that are relevant to today's physics problems but could feasibly be completed by a pair of first-year undergraduates in 72 man hours."
Coil Guns rock. Inspired me to get into electronics. One that shoots Fist sized slugs would be enough for any of us :)
This is not a viral sig. Copy it at your peril.
Accelerate small particles to high speeds, create mini black holes, destroy the planet. Quite fascinating IMO.
That's a great idea. Have them try to figure out which post this was actually meant for. That oughta take about 72 man hours, give or take.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Perhaps a collection of "The Amateur Scientist" columns from Scientific American would be a good source of ideas? A CD of the columns has been published.
Build a gas turbine engine out of an old turbocharger.
Or if you want to go all out, have them fire up a GE90-115B. ;-)
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
You can do some totally awesome things with smoke rings if you rig up a smoke ring maker to a signal generator or a computer and then define various smoke ring generating waveforms/pulses. You end up mixing fluids and electrical/circuits and smoking into one project.
I have no idea what smoke rings are relevant to however.
Securing time on the ISS might prove expensive so I have prepared this simulator out of a trampoline and high-speed camera. I'm not sure exactly what we're trying to prove here but rest assured, the undergrads will be inspired.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
A Theremin makes a good project for undergrads. We probably put ours together in about a day once we got the parts.
In terms of physics experiments, I can't imagine something that would both capture the interest of the students, be cheap enough to have a school with a limited budget be able to afford, and allows for multiple variable parameters to be adjusted. It is also a great summer time project.
Yes, this is sending up a 2 liter plastic bottle (or whatever is handy) by filling it up with water and pressurizing it with compressed air to see how high it can go.
There are all kinds of things that you can measure and document, including thrust (including ISP if you want to get that technical), altitude, learning about trigonometry (to measure altitude), payload mass, and even learning about the basics of the laws of motion through a hands-on experiment. Knowing the altitude and how long it takes to fall from the apogee, you can also calculate the local acceleration factor due to gravity (which can vary from one place to another).
There are also a number of variables that can be adjusted in a controlled manner, such as water volume, air pressure, atmospheric conditions (do rockets fly higher in cooler weather vs. hot weather?), rocket shape, nozzle shape, and rocket size (2 liter vs. 1 liter bottles). You can observe conditions, develop formulas from experimental data, and make predictive theories for what happens when you adjust the variables.
For the really ambitious, there are some 2-stage rocket plans available if you dig up using search engines, but a simple rocket is comparatively easy to build. Be careful with the multi-stage rockets, as you can get enough altitude that you may need to file a flight plan with your local airport under experimental rocketry procedures.
Once upon a time I did a lab were we used a very simple scintillator and an old photomultiplier tube to detect muons and estimate their lifetime. If you have the parts (including the electronics), it is fun. Exciting? Well depends on the student.
When I was in High School (in 1964!) we had a physics curriculum called PSSC. If you can find an original textbook it is full of ideas. It was largely an experimental approach, which was perfect for me at the time. The most fun I had was building a ripple tank. You could add high-tech challenges like digital control of the wave generators (I suggest 2 for point source and 1 for line waves)to look at effects of phase variation and interactions of different wavelengths.
Hmm. That's sad.
And how would you know how a 3 year old asian boy is hung?
Something to think about.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
In my undergrad days, we chose from a series of things to do. This gave us all a chance to choose something we were interested in. Most of the grade came from presentation and analysis though. It took us all a long time to figure out how to attach an importance to error analysis, and how to present our results in an interesting way. We ended up all designing websites with our results using the university's servers. I got more out of designing my own experiment and report than I ever would have gotten out of a pre-conceived lab.
Just to show how fun it could be to have them design a website, check this one out:
http://ratphysics.com/
(This is not mine...)
I always wanted to build a magnetohydrodynamic drive - simply put, generate an electric field which causes ions in salt water to move in the field, and then put a magnetic field 90 degs to that and now you have charged particles moving in an electric field. Guess what, the right hand rule says they will now be pushed "out the back" propelling the ship forward. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive
One of the projects I got to work in my first year of undergrad was a flaming standing wave generator. While Jacob's ladders and Theremins are cool, you can't actually *see* what's going on... not so with the flaming standing wave!
The actual name is the Ruben Tube (not be confused with a Rubix Cube), and it's a fairly simple design, too. Just a hollow tube with holes along the top. One side has a hard cap with a place to attach a gas tube, as with a Bunsen burner. The other side has flexible cap, with a speaker pointing at it.
Turn on the gas, light the tube, and play a constant frequency over the speaker. It sets up a standing, longitudinal wave in the tube, which means compressed and sparse areas of the gas. This lets the students see the wave in the flames, and makes it look like the much-easier-to-visualize transverse wave.
It's easy, it's cool, it's visual, and it helps students wrap their minds around an important aspect of physics. All in all, a great experiment.
Hmm. That's sad.
And how would you know how a 3 year old asian boy is hung?
Something to think about.
Don't jump to conclusions. He probably saw it in the mirror.
Here are a doublet of papers for an undergraduate laboratory demonstrating Bell's Inequality and and entangled photons. The whole apparatus (detailed in the second paper) is estimated to cost USD 15k circa 2002, so the optical elements have probably come down in price since then.
1. Entangled photons, nonlocality, and Bell inequalities in the undergraduate laboratory. [American Journal of Physics 70, 903 (2002)], Dietrich Dehlinger, MW Mitchell. http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0205171/
2. Entangled photon apparatus for the undergraduate laboratory. [American Journal of Physics 70, 898 (2002)], Dietrich Dehlinger, MW Mitchell. http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0205172/
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qda75YWO5Vg
Ultrasonic tape measure / speed of sound experiment. Ultrasonic transducers are easy to come by; students should send some pulses out one, and then sense the return pulse, giving either a numeric indicator or a voltage level that corresponds to the delay time. A little electronics heavy, but if they have had a background in electronics it should be pretty fun. Proof of concept: ultrasonic tape measures at Home Depot for $15. (Trick: you have to build some kind of ultrasonic horn to channel the pulse and collect the return pulse -- otherwise it diffuses too much)
Lunar range finder. Get a green laser pointer and modulate it with a digital stream. Mount a beamsplitter on a little telescope and point it at one of the Apollo landing sites. Send the laser pointer beam out the telescope, pick up the return signal with a photodiode at the eyepiece. With digital correlation, you can measure the distance to the Moon in only a few minutes of integration. This may be a little ambitious for a 36 hour project, but it makes a dandy six-week independent project. As a side bonus, have them calculate the strength of the return signal. It turns out that the experiment wouldn't work without the retroreflectors planted there by the astronauts.
Million-volt van de graaf generator. Given a length of acrylic tubing, a long rubber band, a couple of brushes, a motor, and a big metal ball you too can make sparks that leap halfway across the room. If you really do get a megavolt, you can put a Geiger counter nearby and look for gamma rays(!)
Barometer. Make a barometer that can measure the height of your building. Pretty simple to do - just requires mercury, a glass tube, and care, or (for a more sensitive one, but harder to calibrate) an columnn of vacuum oil with a sealed partial vacuum at the top - but very moving: you can demonstrate the mass of air with remarkably simple equipment.
Pipe organ. Have them cut the tubes to length to create a scale.
Spectroscope. Stanford used to give out posters that could be folded up to make a little spectroscope, with a $0.10 transmission grating slide as a dispersive element. I handed them out to my CU students and asked them to do "something interesting" with them. One of them taped over the slit. Another one used razor blades and sketched the Fraunhofer spectrum of the Sun. Yet another used it to debug a sputtering apparatus for his work/study job. You probably don't want to be that open-ended, but you can certainly ask them to make one and calibrate it using fluorescent lights. Everyone but tape-boy really felt inspired by actually *seeing* spectral absorption and emission lines.
Doppler radar. Not as hard as it once was, this may still be on the ambitious side. Edmund Scientific has microwave transmitters that will serve. Heterodyne the signal with the return pulses, the output frequency gives you the speed.
Measure the curvature of the Earth using a car's odometer and a sextant. Cheap but effective can be had for $25-$30 at sailing supply stores. Have the students travel about 60-100 miles north or south and measure the altitude of a celestial object at both places at the same time of day. Students can "shoot the Sun" at true noon on successive days (compensating for the analemma) or "shoot Polaris" on successive nights at the same time. (Even Polaris is about a degree off the pole, so you can't shoot Polaris at different times on the same night without compensating for that...)
It's from James Gleick's Chaos.
It's an example of order in chaos. What you do is to take a bathtub faucet and hook it up to a water source. Then turn it down to a trickle. Eventually you'll get to the nonlinear bit, where the oscillations from the last drop affect when the current drop falls.
Hook up a light beam to time when each drop falls and plot the result.
Then do a sort of second-order plot. With the delta time between drops 1 and 2 on the X axis, and the time between drops 2 and 3 on the Y axis.
It will create a sort of phase space portrait of the system. You'll see attractors form.
If I had the time I'd do it myself. Sounded pretty magical when I read it the first time.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
A laser measurement experiment could cover a number of interesting theoretical subject areas: optics (diffraction), solid-state physics, and atomic level structure. Experimental areas such as error analysis, linear/nonlinear fitting, lab safety, etc. would definitely be applicable.
One measurement that immediately comes to mind is using single/double-slit diffraction to measure the width of a narrow object, such as a hair or a thin wire. You can place a strand of hair in the light's path and then use the measured distance between the interference fringes to interpolate the width of the hair.
In retrospect, I think this might be a bit basic, and might best be suited as an introductory experiment. You certainly wouldn't have to build anything, if that's what you're aiming for. I personally think that constructing an experiment, unless carefully designed to be robust, would certainly take more than 72 hours.
A few other sources come to mind for me. The American Journal of Physics, which is an pseudo-educational physics magazine, might be useful when looking for new experimental ideas. The lab class I took last year had a bunch of great experiments, some of which are/were fairly cheap to implement:
http://web.mit.edu/8.13/www/experiments.shtml
Ok, the title is just supposed to be catchy.
In my high school AP Physics B/C class, we built a 'railgun' per se to accelerate a metal object down two rails of alternating flow of current (DC current just in opposite directions on each rail). Using the right hand rule or some other memory trick will reveal the forces acting on the projectile, or just look on wikipedia.
Good project to study electricity, magnetic field strength, velocity and acceleration in a 3D plane over a period of time, wind resistance, and most of all shocking the living shit out of yourself with a homemade 3F - 259KV Max Capacitor made of materials used for cooking.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I've always found it frustrating that so many projects described as "experiments" aren't experiments - they're (optionally cool) projects replicating somebody else's work, but you're not learning anything new, you're just validating what somebody else already learned. That can still be fun - hands-on experience is different than book learning for most people, and blowing things up is always a good time - but it's not an experiment.
I've seen lots of freshman engineering / design projects that are at least not just replication - building bridges with toothpicks, making eggs survive dropping from high windows, etc., but even those are often not done with actual science in the process, just empirical engineering.
Some of the typical blowing-things-up projects can also be experimental - make your potato cannon, figure out something about the amount of energy you're getting from the fuel and how far the potato goes and therefore conclude something about your gun's efficiency. (You already knew you needed to point it at a 45 degree angle for maximum distance, and probably even why...) Can you find other ways to learn something new from your projects, even if it's less interesting that the fun of doing the project?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Back in AP Physics in high school my teacher didn't quite have a full agenda for us so we had about two spare weeks to kill at the end of the semester. He wanted to do a project similar to what you're describing and he came up with the idea to build a trebuchet.
There was plenty to build and measure, but there is a ton to calibrate which is the important part. In order to see how far we were from the ideal launch many of us (on our own) were calculating the theoretical maximum lanch distance using the weight we had loaded, the weight of our "ammo" (a tennis ball) the length of the arm and attached string, and quite a few more factors.
The best part about this is you have a very wide variety of math you can accompany with it because a lot of the more negligable forces can be ignored or simplified. If you want you can just do some basic angular momentum / vector acceleration equations and get pretty close to the correct efficiency or you can go as in-depth as calculating frictional forces, properly describe the launch cord motion as a differential equation, etc.
Honestly the experience was probably the most inspirational experience I had not just in physics class, but in school. I'd compare it to a good episode of mythbusters because not only did we get to build something cool and do some calculations, but we got to launch things across our school's front lawn.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Start with a battery powered watergun. Add a couple of small motors to pan back and forth, and to adjust angle up and down. Next, you'll need a ultrasonic rangefinder. Hook that all together, and write a piece of software for a control computer to watch for differences in the distance that it thinks things are at. Scan back and forth, and look for things that are different, then hose them down. We almost got to build one of these, until we mentioned to the prof that we wanted to fill it with naptha, and add a sparker in front of the nozzle of the squirt gun...
Here's a simplified Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment
http://tonic.physics.sunysb.edu/~dteaney/F07_modern/lectures/mlab1_michelson.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment
http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Michelson-Morley_experiment
How about building your own Radio Telescope
http://www.radiotelescopebuilder.com/
For that matter you could get them to build their own Dobsonian although the physics there isn't too hard (basic optics), especially if you don't hand figure the mirror. There's also a large metalwork or woodwork component that might not be considered relevant.
Here are some really good astronomy tutorials (though the prac work is done with simulated software). You might be able to modify them to something more practical
http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/CLEAhome.html
Some of the topics covered by the above
Radio Astronomy of Pulsars
Astrometry of Asteroids
The Revolution of the Moons of Jupiter
The Rotation of Mercury by The Doppler Effect
Photoelectric Photometry of the Pleiades
Spectral Classification of Stars
The Hubble RedShift-Distance Relation
The Flow of Energy Out of the Sun
The Quest for Object X
Jupiter's Moons and the Speed of Light: The Classic Roemer Experiment
There are books and web pages out there....many tend to be geared to highschool, then there are some that would require you to up your insurance...so you'll have to sift through them
http://physics.about.com/od/physicsexperiments/tp/experimentbooks.htm
http://www.educypedia.be/education/physicsexperiments.htm
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I recommend having them build a Theremin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin ). Several students did this at CU Boulder, and the results were both informative and amusing.
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
Disassociate H2 and O2 from water, measure the energy. Evaluate how much you get back in 35% efficient burning
Why do windmills have 3 blades. Why not 50? Why not 1 ? Why not 2 ?
Expose film with active radioactive element (Americium) from a smoke detector
Millikans oil drop experiment (I always loved that one)
These are just the ones that come to mind at 10:00 on a Monday night. I'm sure there are many MANY more.
Tesla Coils are very cool. And I've seen a lot of renewed interest lately in their applications for wireless power distribution.
Some simple experiments.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Nothing is cooler, and nothing is such a opening to the amazing magic of physics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMTBQxbDpyc
Because they can!
You can't take the sky from me...
Fill an enormous balloon with hydrogen and oxygen, then hold a candle up to it.
My freshman undergrad chemistry professor did that in a big lecture hall. I can't say I was inspired by it, but it is the only thing I remember from that class.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
Take a long length of cable (or fiber, but cable is fine) and turn it into memory...
Give them an appreciation for how much of an ethernet frame is actually in transit over 100m of ethernet at any one time. (about 33 bits). Teach them to take Ethernet cards apart and use the circuits in them to build a complete memory unit.
Make them develop their own memory - enough to store their name, using common components, eg, using sound waves or similar to store data. You can even store data as mechanical waves in a spring with transducers.
Use high frequency programmable pulse generators to gate image tubes so you can use light to build a three dimensional image (like LIDAR) with a camera. (You can build LIDARs too, but that usually requires complex mechanical components).
Having a concept of how dynamic things can be can be useful. Most people tend to have static minds - eg, we see things in a fixed state.
Thinking of things as dynamic can be a useful skill to gain.
Also, don't forget practical recreation of physics experiments, such as measuring the speed of light with rotating mirrors and lasers (or even a candle)....
Reproducing an old experiment can also be incredibly valuable. Or better still, use modern technology to improve such an experiment to make it "classroom" sized.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
In undergrad we spent a few weeks attempting to reproduce Dr. Taleyarkhan work on sonic cavitation experiments in deuterated acetone. While there is much controversy surrounding the this type of fusion, it is an interesting and simple experiment, but hard to get reliable results.
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Bubble_fusion
For students it is be exciting to be apart of the human quest for fusion power. And is useful as a teaching tool for all methods of fusion. Taking part in a controversial research project can be very stimulating.
The experiment can be attempted using a pyrex 100mL flask and placed piezoelectric speakers at key locations. The flask is filled with deuterated acetone and the speakers are modulated at different frequencies until cavitation and sonoluminescence is achieved. Their are several types of neutron detectors that can be used. Some of them cheaper than others but less sensitive.
Anyways, just an idea. Alternatively, you can also build a fusor, which is a bit more involved but with the right setup could also work for a short term project, would require you todo some pre-building. http://www.fusor.net/
-alot cheaper than ITER or Lawrence Livermore laser confinement...
Build a gas turbine engine out of an old turbocharger.
I just had a Junkyard Wars flashback.
Perhaps you could get them to build some sort of remote sampling device, like a simulated Mars probe/rover or something.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Every undergraduate should play with fire at least once. Have your students build a Ruben's tube to demonstrate standing waves. Bonus points if they can predict the the frequencies which will produce sinusoidal flame patterns prior to lighting it.
Ionocrafts (ion propelled aircrafts, also known as lifters) are definitely a first pick. Hook up your old monitor to an aluminum foiled balsa structure and... you just created an UFO. Wikipedia has a few links on the subject.
For ideas:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/wop.htm
[Mirror: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:Czfkx2_qDggJ:sprott.physics.wisc.edu/wop.htm+http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/wop.htm&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
]
(He had our attention when he rolled into the lecture hall on a liquid-nitrogen propelled tricycle..)
[Prof. Sprott -- sorry about the Slashdotting...]
A good engineering challange is building a something launcher. Whether it be eggs, taters, t shirts, etc., the project will provide many reasons to do the engineering. Recently I participated in an engineering challange for high school students to build a t shirt launcher.
Some of the items needed solved were what type of stored energy to use, how to release it quickly and effeciently, and how to transfer the energy with little loss of energy.
Some of the material was beyond HS physics, so some stuff came to measurement, trial and error, and tweaking for best performance.
Here is the web page dedicated to finding out the best diameter and length of a launch tube to match the stored enengy supply in both volume, pressure, and flow rate from the valve.
https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Barrel+length+trim+method
We measured the acceleration of stuff in the launch tube to find the point where the acceleration dropped off at the peak speed and cut it there.
We won the competition. Arlington HS is the overall winner.
Those guys have me hooked now on competition marshmallow launching. I just built a small version (0.8L tank) of the launcher. From the sound, I think it's supersonic. I'll be getting near a shooting chrono later to find out if I made supersonic.
The t shirt cannon was launching apples in excess of 800 FPS. I'm hoping I'm getting marshmallows in excess of 1100 FPS.
Impact of fruit against 1 L water bottles can be seen here.
https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Photos
Tons of fun. Think safety if you embark on this trial.
The truth shall set you free!
Hmmm... it looks like the post anonymously button is working today. You must just be an idiot.
I recently had my first physics class as a college sophomore, calculus-based mechanics. It was very fun and useful, as a computer programmer. This was my first lab class since high school and I was certainly inspired by each of the ~3 hour labs. The most fun was using a spring cannon to shoot a rubber ball through a ring, using kinematics equations my group of 3 was able to launch the ball precisely through the ring on the first attempt (we were scored by number of attempts).
We spent a total of about 30 hours on 10 labs throughout the semester. I found these to be a good length for keeping our attention and teaching each concept. It was nice to have access to a fairly new lab with laptops which we used to record and analyze sensor data. This all takes place in a very affordable California community college.
I know I haven't answered the question yet, just providing info on my experience for whatever it's worth.
Other interesting labs were: landing a ball in a small cup after rolling off a slope on top of a table. using a car with a fan attached to measure acceleration and velocity. colliding cars of different masses to measure impulse. calculating mass by measuring the velocity of a car being pulled by a mass on a string which was pulled down by gravity.
This class covered only mechanics. I imagine that labs in the fields of electromagnetism, waves and optics must be exciting in different ways. This first physics class left me wanting more, but those will have to wait, as they aren't required in my computer game design major.
One experiment could involve some rockets and landing a delicate payload safely. It has obvious applications. Other useful applications of physics should be sources of inspiration. A student should feel inspired by doing something useful with physics, something that they would use as a professional physicist, something to form the basis for novel applications of physics.
Something involving optics like capturing images of comets using a handmade telescope could be fun.
With the green energy revolution upon us, there could be some home made wind, tidal, and solar energy capture and storage systems to build.
The San Francisco Exploratorium, an interactive, hands-on science museum, published a three-volume set of instructions for creating useful and educational (and sturdy) projects for children and adults to manipulate and study, although these are now hard to find, and expensive. Search the used books website http://www.abebooks.com/ for "Exploratorium Cookbook" (and grab any copies you can) and see also the Exploratorium website at http://www.exploratorium.edu/ . See also the very recently published book "Laboratory Experiments in College Physics" by C. Bernard and C. Epp, published in December 2008 (ISBN 978-0471002512) available on http://www.amazon.com./
Sci-Fi captures imaginations, so pick something from that - let's say a light-sabre from Star Wars.
Have them build one, explain why it can't be done yet, and demonstrate some current technologies which will probably evolve into the Sci-Fi device. Calculate the battery capacity such a device would require, the power output required to cut through a 2 centimeter thick steel plate, etc.
Have them build a lumen meter for measuring light bulbs. Its the sort of thing that each year and add to or redesign since it seems simple to get initial results but the problems go much deeper.
To engage them, give them broad topics to explore such as conservation of momentum, change of state, magnetism, and illustrate them with they own experiments.
That microgravity on human body thing's good too.
Yes.
Next question.
36 Hours!!! Thanks for the laugh. Kinda brings a tear to my eye actually thinking back to all those oh so many more than 36 hours I spent in school working on your typical discipline related projects. Not that I regret it or anything, but 36 hours - that's just plain funny!
...physics experiments in underground lairs, (cough), sure, (cough cough) ? In my time, we conducted all kinds of experiments in underground lairs, (cough cough) - but rarely any physics involved. Science, that is, (cough).
Now get off my lawn !
I hear that the Large Hadron Collider is currently having problems. Maybe your students can build a replacement ... except smaller. Call it the SHC, or even the VTHC.
Magnetic Tires - "the concept of an internal electromagnetic system within a radial tire with applications including but not limited to: use as a braking mechanism; potential replacement of mechanical engines and hence elimination of reliance on fossil fuels; and regeneration of electrical energy from induced current to dynamically recharge the batteryâ
Isaac Lim
isaac.lim@me.com
What the hell is this with the lasers? These are not projects that are comprehensible on a fundamental physics level, at least not in the construction of the projects you described. And Jacob's Ladder? Seriously? I remember doing that experiment in JUNIOR HIGH school. What has happened to science education today?
I'll give you an example of a laser experiment gone wrong. I remember when I was a junior in high school back in the 1970s, I was taking AP Physics, and lasers were brand new and expensive. But our school just bought one and we were dying to figure out experiments to fiddle with it. One day I read an offhand remark in a physics book that the angle of polarization of a laser beam could be altered by a magnetic field. This seemed impossible to me, sure a laser was an electromagnetic phenomenon, but it was light, how could magnetism affect it? So I figured I could get one of our strongest magnets that weighed about a hundred pounds, run the laser through the gap, and measure deflection with a couple of simple polarizing filters. But no matter what I did, I could not measure any deflection. The teacher suggested I try using a longer beam, maybe hundreds of yards between the source polarizer and the detector. That was a total red herring. My lab partner and I tried all sorts of things to use as long a laser path as possible, a few hundred yards even, but even a car driving by the building would make the whole rig vibrate enough to make it impossible to hit the target, let alone measure the polarization. After a week of fiddling around, we finally went back to the physics teacher and admitted defeat. The teacher burst out laughing, and said, "oh of course, what you were trying to do is impossible, and the length of the beam is irrelevant. It would take massive magnets the size of a house to cause any measurable deflection. I just wanted to see what lengths you'd go to to try to measure it." Oh was I pissed.
Well anyway, I have a dim view of the sort of example physics experiments you described (other than the cloud chamber). We did much tougher experiments in high school. Try giving your students the classics, experiments they'll really learn the FUNDAMENTALS of physics from. I have fond memories of doing the Miliken Oil Drop Experiment in high school, it was so much fun I did it over and over to get more accurate results. Or give your students old school equipment like oscilloscopes. You little kiddies DO know what an oscilloscope is, don't you? We did experiments like setting up two microwave emitters side by side to generate an interference pattern, then hooking up an oscilloscope to a detector, then moved the detector around to measure the high and low energy points of the pattern, then plotted the positions of the detector over graph paper. The teacher didn't tell us the frequency of the emitters so we had to work that out for ourselves from the interference pattern. There are loads of classic physics experiments using oscilloscopes, but they are largely forgotten today because the teachers never learned to use them properly when they were undergrads. Maybe it's time for YOU to learn about them.
If you can't get freshmen physics students motivated by the classic experiments showing the most fundamental aspects of physics, experiments that once were so difficult that they were only done in the greatest labs of Nobel Prizewinning physicists, but now are easily performed in any school lab, you will fail as a physics teacher, and at the goal of teaching physics. Flashy gadgets with frickin' lasers are no substitute for the beauty of the simplest physical phenomenon. If you can't get students to see that through your labs, it will be your failure, not theirs.
Have them pick the project they want to do subject to your approval. If it's too expensive see if they can drum up sponsorship... might be a little tough with how the economy is doing these days.
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
This is a *perfect* excuse to build a Tesla coil.
Forget about all these complicated electrical experiments that the students will feel like they only vaguely understand. First years have no idea what Maxwell's equations are and are probably still very shaky on Kirchhoff. Anything else in Modern Physics, forget it. Many will be overwhelmed because they have no possible way of understanding all the assumptions that went into setting up the experiment. (And you really don't want people questioning whether a meaningful solution can actually be attained).
Have them do something with mechanics. There are plenty of really neat demos that can be done in mechanics that can also be explained to a very high degree without calculus. Something along the lines of the ventomobil, for example. This is cutting edge engineering rather than cutting edge physics, but this is the type of thing that they can understand just by looking at it, and they will have fun pondering questions like: "can it go directly into the wind?" and "can it ever exceed the wind speed?". When you have an intrinsic idea of how things work, exploring the details of something neat will be much more interesting.
The biggest factors here are your enthusiasm, and how well you identify the needs of each student. Physics is a touchy subject for many, and if they get started off on the wrong foot, forget it. They will stop trying. Take your time (really take your time) at the beginning so that no one gets lost, and your students will have lots of fun.
How about a Stirling engine run both as a heat engine and backwards with supplied external work to serve as a refrigerator? Can really do some good thermodynamic/calorimetry experiments, especially if you have some thermocouples to measure temperatures.
I was always impressed hearing a friend describe her low-temperature physics class, where they were always cooling things to 3 degrees Kelvin and then doing various interesting experiments. I'd imagine that takes a fair bit of resources and department expertise, though.
I don't actually remember the specific experiments, because as happens with most research of this kind, building the equipment to cool a chamber down to 3 degrees Kelvin is 95% of the work...
Yeah, quantum tunneling is a great way to explore many different materials. Also, semiconductor physics can be easy to get into but also get truly in depth with. It would be easy to do work with doping of semiconductors, FETs, and many other similar things. If you are ambitious enough, you could also have them explore the quantum Hall effect.
As a graduate student in physics at RPI, I'm often disappointed by the lack of physical examples and applications of the material that plagues the teaching of our field. While projects on the latest in our field is terribly sexy, I'd encourage you not to forget that the basics of physics holds some great and terribly interesting insights. I've found that in our rush to learn the latest craze in the field, many HIGHLY intelligent students in physics lack a comprehensive understanding of the basics of their field. While I can't come up with any particularly good suggestions in my scotch-induced stupor, might I suggest some sort of clever experimental process to confirm lower level theory that ties together course work that the students have already encountered.
I was just a few years ago a physics undergraduate student... I can recommend a few ideas:
~Hologram kit from Integraf kits are viable. Completing the entire project in less than 72 hours however may take some preparation as the film must dry and the setup can be subtle.
~Experiments with Jupiter's moons: you can actually see changes in their positions in the time of a single night with a plain telescope. Lots of possibilities here.
~Roll balls down a ramp to measure G. ~Look at the spectra of sunlight, identify Balmer lines.
~Get some liquid nitrogen and YBCO and play with superconductivity.
A lot of the physics behind these experiments can be subtle so don't expect students to understand everything.
I know this may sound cliche, but why not let future scientists work on something GREEN. By green, i mean projects to help save our planet. Such projects can be "free" energy, ie "free from bills" houses.
Abstraction Physics
working with chaotic lasers is much fun, and considering that chaos is the last revolution in physics ( some say ) it would be quite interesting
1) Random number generator based off of physical phenomena - basically take a can, drill a hole in it, install a webcam, seal off the light and the can. Turn on, and turn the video into data... Check for randomness. Discuss what camera is 'seeing' inside a dark can, and why it's being detected (that's the fun part - the random number generation is just a nice aside)...
2) Laser sound detector - a fairly easy experiment. Actual story: At the school I attended, a lot of students put tin foil over the entire window so it'd block the light - then they could sleep in, toke up, etc... We built a laser sound detector based off of the Radio Electronics article (yep, back in the 80's), and started shining it on everything we could think of... We finally hit upon a window in the girls dorm one night that gave us some very interesting sounds - piped that into a stereo in another room (amazing how thin the walls are behind bulletin boards) and pumped the sound out the window as loud as it would go... At the time (oh 1am), the young lady and her friend heard themselves, and then we heard the young lady saying "What the &(*&*&& do you assholes have a microphone in this room! Shit!"...
They never did figure it out... we laughed our asses off for days... And when our electronics prof heard about it, we got extra credit points for completing the LASER and getting the receiver working.... ... damn I miss college...
Cheap. Awesome. Loud noises. Involves simple electronics and interesting EM phenomena.
Superfluid He is also wickedly cool. If you can build something to house it, and pump on it until it gets cold enough, you should be able to do some cool experiments with it.
Though not as visually appealing as a cloud chamber, building a detector to measure the lifetime of a muon was one of my favorite undergrad experiments. Three scientilators stacked on top of each other wired into a bunch of electronics, along with the right formulas, and you can get a reasonable measurement. My prof gave us a Phys Rev paper describing how it was done years ago, access to the parts we needed, a scope, and a computer that had a labview application set up for counting experiments. We figured out the electronic logic from the paper, used the scope to debug and set all the triggers correctly, then had to figure out how to actually calcuate the lifetime from what we measured (along with systematic + statistical errrors). Hard, yes, but man we learned a good deal about real nuts and bolts experimental physics that quarter.
I think you should try as hard as possible to replicate the process of discovery that the great scientists of the past have undergone, especially in a first exposure to college physics. There is no better way to understand how the concepts (quantities, really) of position, velocity, and acceleration interact than by rolling a metal ball down a ramp and taking measurements with the goal of establishing predictive results. I had to replicate this famous experiment of Galileo's with extremely primitive instruments (i.e. my pulse and pseudo-reliable internal metronome). Of course, you don't want to make it so difficult that it becomes frustrating to your students, but making them digest data and create original (or for those who've been exposed to physics in high school, imitative) models should be the goal.
I just spent 9-5 yesterday underground in our labs, programming a simple processor with one or two byte opcodes, having just wired up a very large number of logic gates (via a patch panel) to its control lines in order to create subtraction and addition functions. Registers are displayed in the form of eight blinking LEDs on the front. The whole thing is about as big as a large modern laptop, and infinitely more simple -- it had a very limited instruction set (jump conditional, add, subtract, jump unconditional, start subroutine, etc) and a selectable clock speed of between 1Hz and 300 Hz. The standard method of debugging is, of course, to step through cycle-by-cycle and check the values of the registers and memory making sure they're what you expect them to be.
After two hours trying to get a program to print out the first 12 fibronanci numbers to work (entered via lots and lots of hex on the 'front panel', compounded by the fact that I hadn't noticed one of the wires had fallen out...), I can tell you that the final sight of this very simple computer working to do something useful was inspiring indeed. I've written some assembly overnight that should act as a 4-bit multiplier, and some more assembly to act as a memory-checker.
Regarding what others have said on the page: Millikan's Oil-Drop hurts your eyes, and doesn't give very good results. I personally hate it. On the other hand, if you first years have done Maxwells equations properly (I learnt them in my first year; and it's not hard to derive c=1/sqrt(\mu_0 \epsilon_0) in free space from them), then it's easy to have equipment that allows you to very, very, accurately measure the speed of light. This I did find cool indeed. Likewise for fourier optics and information theory, along with anything that involved liquid nitrogen ("Introduction to pressure gauges"). Finally, there are a few important QM demonstrations that you might like to consider -- Stern-Gerlach, Zeeman effect, and so on.
Good luck!
My UID is prime. Is yours?
Have them build Steel Pans 72 Man hours wouldn't be enough for building a complete pan, but they could certainly build a pan with 5 or 6 notes. Lots of things to be calculated, dish size, note size, groove size etc. It was all worked out originally by pure empirical experimentation, so if the calculations are off by a bit, it's there's enough wiggle room that you can adjust things. (What? That note marked C3? Nono, that was a typo, it was supposed to be a F3 all along...) The physics of it are actually quite fascinating, and at the end of it, you have a musical instrument...
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
I think you should follow the fad here. Lot of them probably got into the field to "find solution of the energy crisis". Why dont build something solar/wind to, I don't know, maybe charge their cellphone/laptop?
Build an electrocardiogram. The students get to learn some electronics, some programming, some data analysis, and some biology.
You'd be better off with projects that consolidated on what you've taught them during the year. The description on the website sounds very patronising and appears to be more like something to keep them entertained while the exams are on.
(A better idea would be to have the student propose their own projects.)
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Sand on plate. Standing wave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPcJbb5Qfj0
Fire. Fire. Fire. Rubens Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyIphO4Ypoo&feature=related
Could come in handy...
I'd like to suggest building "the world's simplest fusion reactor. Go to fusor.net and read Tom Ligon's article on it. A vacuum chamber with pump and a medium voltage transformer are the only spendy items involved, and I'd think an undergraduate physics lab might already have access to such things. Tom's write-up implies that 72 man-hours should be more than sufficient to build the thing and start to play with it.
It's not quite as awesome as burning or exploding things, but creating nuclear fusion has to be pretty cool.
That's the first question...
Thermodynamics, waves, subatomic particles etc etc.
Deleted
Generate thousands of volts and make sparks from dripping water.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_water_dropper
I made one of these as a physics project, and they do work.
I used:
rubber tubing
glass tubing heated and stretched in a Bunsen burner flame to make the nozzles
small tin cans with the bottoms removed for the rings through which the water dripped
the tin lids in the bottom of large polythene beakers as contacts
insulated wire soldered to cross-couple the lids and cans
retort stands with dry polythene bags as insulation to hold the tin cans
After a minute or two of operation the fine water drip/spray breaks up into very fine droplets which then curve upwards as they pass through the tin cans. You can then get a 5-10mm spark between two bare patches of the cross-coupling wires.
Have a look at IEEE's RWEP project library (http://www.realworldengineering.org/library.html) Quoting: It is "A library of high-quality, tested, hands-on team-based society-focused projects for first-year students. These projects are designed to increase the recruitment, persistence to degree, and satisfaction of all students, and particularly women, in baccalaureate EE, CE, CS, BE and EET degree programs." Most of them have a strong physics background...
-- Regards, Antonio Costa.
I did a great project on shape memory alloys (SMA). We made a rather crude finger made out of lego and SMA, which was controlable by passing a current through each "muscle". However that was about 9 years ago, I am sure the technology has moved along a lot since then and you could possibly do more intresting things now. G
As an undergraduate, I recently built a Paul Trap from this paper: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1991AmJPh..59..807W It was rad! I suggest using a tesla coil to charge the particles.
Try and measure Big G (the Gravitational Constant) by a torsion balance. I've seen it done during a lecture at university - the rotation of the balance was measured by reflecting a laser off a mirror mounted on the balance.
It's exceptionally hard to be accurate, and the whole experiment can be unduly affected by a crowd of people walking into a lecture theatre at the start....
sorry if those came up before, did not want to read through all the nonsense comments:
Millikan's experiment, measure charge of an elektron
Speed of light using Michaelsons turning mirror method. Requires a mirror, an electric drill, a collimator mirror, a laser and a scope (great fun to build).
make holograms (no calculations, still fun)
pauli traps (careful, high voltage)
I'm reminded of a project given to physics undergraduates at the Uni I went to. ... something of a beast of a magnet.
They were given the task of measuring the earth's magnetic field, and estimating altitude/height of the buildings around the campus based on it.
Of course what they weren't told was that the physics lab has an Nuclear magnetic resonance lab, with
Catches out the lazy undergrads, or the ones that 'fudge' results, whilst rewarding those that are paying attention and going to the effort to explain quite why the physics lab gives such insane results.
How about a Scanning Electron Microscope, based on a surplus electron gun from a CRT plus a vacuum pump?
For the non-physicists of us wandering around Imperial, any chance we could get to see some of the cool experiments? Just for kicks and giggles quite frankly (*far* too down the CS route to considering switching allegiance), but might it be possible anyway?
Beware the psychokinetic mimes!
Dear SlashDotters, Firstly may I thank you for taking your time to respond in such numbers. Some of your suggestions and comments I shall attempt to respond to directly but due to the sheer volume this is an impossibility due to the paper I must submit by the end of the day (for the progress of science and all). There have been a number of excellent project proposals, far more than I could hope to run, but I'm sure this advice will become helpful to my colleagues as well. Firstly may I clarify that these are university students, not school students. The definition of these things seems to go slightly awry when converting between us British and our esteemed American colleagues. Secondly, thank you very much to those of you who have spent the time to suggest changes in teaching practices. Advice on focusing on core ideas instead of flashy gimmicks is something which I agree with entirely. There is no point in getting the student to do something which looks cool but they cannot contemplate or understand what is going on. This said I feel there is no reason why these two things cannot be coupled together giving both that fundamental understanding and the experience of a project which may inspire them away from banking and into a life of science. Thirdly I thank those of you that have pointed me to online resources for ideas, I havenâ(TM)t had a chance to run through them yet, but will get round to them in the full course of time. Fourthly regrettably some of the projects suggested I have disregarded as they have either already been covered or will be covered the following years (Such as measurement of G, The Hall effect and resonant modes in sand on a plate to name a few). Others I have been forced to resign to the drawer of ideas other demonstrators will be putting forward, some of them have been doing the same thing for years, such as the Theremin, the autonomous robots or building an ECG. And others I have not yet excluded, such as the bubble fusion idea (sonoluminescence). Actually I believe we may have a full experimental kit for a sonoluminescence experiment, but I will have to investigate. Finally I will thank those of you who have suggested projects that I may well run, and the inspiration for project connections that I have gleaned from some of your responses. I am currently considering a number of them including looking at solar cells and methods for improving light capture onto a the small area. Or looking at the possibility of building a spectrometer, calibrating it and then using it for calculations on either extra-solar red shifts or from a physical chemistry side (chemiluminescene â" energy transition and catalysts for example). Anyway, I better return to work now and think further on this later. With great thanks, Peter p.s. Those who made me smile get a special thank-you. Submarine avoidance may become a field of further investment.
MIT used to have an 8.01x and 8.02x for physics w/ experiments - you may want to search about that
Visible semiconductor sources are dirt cheap. You can buy a manual single-axis linear stage/micrometer fairly cheaply. Only one of the mirrors needs to move. They will learn a good deal about optics, beam splitters, interference, optical path-lengths and all that. They will also need to build a photodetector, so you get electronics aswell i.e. get them to do all the pre-requisite op-amp experiments. I assume most Physics Depts have access to data acquisition software so they can learn about collecting data the way modern way. As well as getting all this practical knowledge you are doing a very fundamental experiment with a very profound result. On top of all that the set-up can be extended to be used in conjunction with other applications, e.g. measure the refractive index of air, basic spectroscopic analysis, adjust it to get a fabry-perot interferometer which leads on to the Physics behind semiconductor lasers and on, and on.....
Thanks for the response, Good suggestions, They have already done a few interferometers. I might consider another interferometer such as the Twyman-Green.
Let's do the experiment and settle this puzzle once and for all.
All you need are 2 lines on the lab wall a few meters apart and a short ruler.
Leidenfrost effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect ) . You can measure lifetime of water drops as a function of the temperature of the surface they are being droped on.
You can measure the same effect on liquid nitrogen by immersing a metal piece on liquid nitrogen and measure temperature of the piece as a function of time (I did it with a diode put inside a sealed hole on the metal piece).
They can identify different heat transport regimes.
Both of the experiments are really nice to see. And it's always fun to work with liquid nitrogen.
How about oscillations, decay, harmonics in swinging breasts .. preferably not male ones ..
In Grade 12 physics, I built a Tesla Coil Generator with a partner. I can't remember how many hours it took, but is was at least 50-60 hours. While a lot of the work is really mundane, the final result is something to see. We has about 12-15" of spark, and had it doing all sorts of things a Grade 12 student wouldn't think possible: lighting florescent tubes, passing through 30 bodies and not hurting anyone, exploding a stripe of caps for a toy gun, the list goes on..
The project will teach your students about high frequency electricity, and induction.
Do photoshop-style image processing in real time by building a 4f correlator.
Have a bunch of photographic slides as source images (have a horizontal screen, a vertical screen, a mesh, and a few classic images), and start removing and replacing horizontal or vertical information in the Fourier plane (block the image with a razor blade). Then start blocking out the center (use slides with a spot in them) or the edges (try irises) of the Fourier plane, and watch the low and high frequency information disappear from the image. Get crazy.
Introduce the concepts with some fun digital image processing in either Matlab or Python with FFTs, and maybe print out some transparencies to place in the Fourier plane.
This experiment really wrapped together the concepts I was learning in math, CS, art, and optics. Using physical objects for real-time parallel processing was mind-blowing.
Somebody mentioned barometer already, but what I did in one of my meteorology classes a few years ago was build a water barometer out of clear rigid plastic pipe. A mercury barometer is so short because the density of mercury is so high; water is less dense but safer... and for a hundred bucks or so of materials (pipe segments, glue, clamps, fittings etc.) you can build one in the stairwell where people will see it and ask lots of questions. You can also teach about the idea of saturation vapor pressure and boiling water at room temperature when you "activate" it. (Submitter, email me if you want more details of what we did and what I'd do differently if I did it again.) Ours was up for a few weeks and it worked quite well.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
I remember building a seismograph based on an old Scientific American article.
The unit itself was pretty simple to build (some plumbing pipes, a good strong magnet, coil, all hooked up to an oscilloscope or paper plotter - nowadays could just be hooked up to a computer using a serial port).
Interesting project and covers a variety of physics concepts such as induction, momentum, etc.
That's what I had to do this summer after 1 year of university.
Rebuilding the BBO-Source based upon the Kwiat paper. Depending on how much is alrady prepared you can tune the time needed to finish it.
The positive thing about it is, to get in touch with quantumn information, which is quite up to date (although you nowadays build sagnac sources).
Another option would be to build a cavity.
Anyway it would be nice if you could give more parameters: What stuff have you got available, should it be related to topics already learned or should it show whats coming up in the next year...
lg
Why not make them build a tesla coil.
They are great fun to play with, and they
do not require alot of components.
tesla coil videoes
You could always go with the old stand by: A ballistic catapult launching steel balls. My twist on that idea was demanding the neighboring tables in lab heave to or be boarded. Arrrrrrr! Send over your wenches, ya scurvy dogs! Arrrrr!
College was so much fun.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'd suggest: 1) Hall effect on a piece of silicon (Easy, cheap, and you really do measure something useful) 2)Table top trebuchet or catapult
The graduate students up at U of C built a display accelerator using a couple of CRT tubes.
One crt provides the electron gun the other the "screen" where by you can see the electron beam.
The project requires learning to fuse a glass tube to each CRT to create a beamline. Using getters to evacuate the line and the tubes (which must be opened to attach the line. Winding magnet dipoles to create vertical and horizontal correctors and focusing quads.
Not that expensive: The tubes(old tube TVs can be
salvaged for power supplies and CRTs) the magnets are just air core electromagnets which can be wound wire held together with cable ties. Glass tubing. Some rheostats to control the dc to the magnets.
Get some PVC tubing, some metal cans, some plastic shopping bags, clear packing tape, an old fan motor, some aluminum foil, and some wire, and some stuff needed to glue or fasten it together. Then you make some rollers out of the cans (if you can, make them barrel shaped so the belt will center), drive one with an old electric fan motor. Make a belt with by cutting up the plastic grocery bags and putting them together with clear packing tape (that plastic can hold a bit of charge). Make brushes with the aluminum foil (connect one to ground with the wire, and the other to where your pickup is). It'll be up to you to figure out the rest of the design and assembly. And then you can then have a rather crude but working Van de Graff generator. Once built and tested you can go about making all kinds of experiments. And because it's crude and cheap, you can make multiples (once you work out the kinks) so everyone can play.
Or if you have some old CRT monitors sitting around somewhere, you could tape aluminum foil over the screen and run a wire to that. Then you have a pretty basic electron source without too much effort or electronics work. Of course if electronics work isn't a problem, may as well build a real Tesla coil instead.
Having them build an audio modulated Tesla Coil would be a challenge both in the high voltage aspect (resonance), and the low voltage aspect (building the controller PCB). There are also several types of Tesla Coils you can build, with many different options to choose from when it comes to switching the power. Spark Gap (SGTC) Uses a simple spark gap for the HV switch (Can be modified further to use a forced switch spark gap (Motor w/ moving electrodes) Synchronous spark gap or asynchronous spark gap. Vacuum Tube (VTTC) Uses old vacuum tube(s) as the HV switch Solid State (SSTC) Built with semiconductor switches. Direct Resonant Solid State (DRSSTC) Semiconductor switches with a feedback line to self-tune Audio Modulated Direct Resonant Solid State (AMDRSSTC) The biggest challenge of them all, a solid state switch, feedback for direct resonance, and audio modulated with an external device. The challenge here is to not fry your audio device, and make music from the arcs. See youtube for videos on these specific types of TC's.
We built a superconducting heat engine; it involved a liquid nitrogen bath, a powerful yoke magnet with mu metal, and a disk with high temperature superconductors placed around the outside of the disk. A horizontal axle goes through the center of the disk, the bottom of the disk is immersed in liquid nitrogen. Give the disk a little push to start it rotating, then it will continue to run by itself. The warm superconductor enters the liquid nitrogen, the magnetic field passes through the superconductor. The superconductor cools and begins to superconduct and the magnetic flux no longer passes through the superconductor, it now generates a force which rotates the disk. We also improved the project by adding diagnostics.
Another interesting undergrad project I did was to build a cosmic hodoscope. This involved scintillator paddles, dark boxes, optical fibers, photomultipliers, and timing electronics. When constructed one arranged two scintillator paddles such that if a cosmic particle passed through them it would cause light to bounce around the scintillator, into the optical fiber, to the photomultiplier tube, and to the electronics. If the electronics detected a signal from both scintillators within a given timing gate then we counted that as a cosmic particle that passed through both scintillators. One can get fancy with readouts, computers, and arrangement of the scintillators.
You could demonstrate that a washed out student jumping off a bridge falls at the same speed as a credit rating when you don't pay your crushing student loans.
That aught to motivate the hell out of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence I haven't looked into it in depth, but a colleague once mentioned it as being the sort of thing a smaller institution could set up for the price of some water and transducers and it has some pretty nifty effects and is still largely not understood. Conceivably this could be the basis of a whole range of activities over a number of years as different groups could explore different aspects of it while designing and building equipment to measure the various aspects.
A little old school, but it involves high-voltage (fun), apparatus building (interesting), and calculation.
As an undergrad I did an experiment in my 1st year lab to measure an FID from a basic NMR setup (large electromagnet, wire wound around a test tube for the RF coil, lock-in amp for recording the signal). The experiment was a pig to set up, but somehow I really enjoyed it. I think it was the only experiment in the lab that gave a sense of achievement for actually recording something, and again for figuring out what I had recorded. As a novelty, and earth's field NMR rig should produce a signal in the audio range. If you can manage to detect a spin echo, you should be able to hear it!
Nothing piqued my interest in physics like witnessing the double slit experiment done with a laser.
It was a total mind frag.
Honestly, the Millikan experiment was great; manually determination of the charge on an electron is doable and interesting. And hey, it's the experiment's 100th birthday this year!
Have them build a water-drop electrostatic generator. Very doable on the time-frame and budget.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
It might not be as thrilling as blowing something up, but the principles behind Foccault's pendulum and it's daily precession seem to fit the stated timescale and budget. If you've got appropriate facilities, you could have the students construct a model or two (maybe one big one outdoors and a smaller one in a more controlled environment), attempt to derive predictions about what's going to happen, then at the end of the experiment do some statistical analysis to see if the class as a whole performed better than chance at predicting the outcome.
How about an experiment to keep the bathrooms around the physics building clean?
If your students are gamers (likely, since they are science nerds), you may be able to think up some experiments in the interest of advancing in-game physics. Games like half-life2 and portal have only opened the door.
You could have them build a radio and talk to the space station. Ya, I know it's a lame high-school level project, but the Canadians seem to have impressed themselves recently with this "experiment".
A team project building killer robots might just spark that next super-villian. Just think that you could be listed as his/her mentor.
I suspect that the sonoluminescence experiment (not to mention the Bell's inequality one) might be a little over-the-top for a first-year set of students. There are a lot of subtleties to them that would probably get lost unless the students really understand the basics about the principles.
However, one often doesn't need a fancy setup for the sono experiments: I saw a talk several years ago where a student did the experiment extremely cheaply, and got fantastic results (and, I believe, the optics used to catch the results are probably quite informative in their own way). The technique is termed the "drop tube" method, and you don't need a transducer to trap/excite the bubbles. The abstract of the talk:
Drop tube generates 10-W flashes of sonoluminescence (A)
Brian A. Kappus, Avic Chakravarty, and Seth J. Putterman
Phys. Dept., UCLA, 1-129 Knudsen Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095
Use of a low vapor pressure liquid such as phosphoric acid, with dissolved xenon in a vertically exited tube, generates ~200-ns flashes of sonoluminescence with a peak power of 10 W. We are in the process of characterizing the bubble motion by use of backlighting, stroboscopic, and streak photography. We will also broach the topic of disequilibrium between atom and electron temperatures. [Research funded by DARPA. We thank Carlos Camara and Shahzad Khalid for valuable discussions.] a)Deceased.
and Putterman's webpage: http://www.physics.ucla.edu/research/putterman/gallery/index1.htm
I've had my students build repulsion coils to teach basic theory and have a little fun. You make a solenoid coil with an extra long armature, say about one meter in length with the solenoid coil at one end. The armature should be made from a bundle of soft iron rods (welding rods are great) and painted to insulate them. Then you make a "washer" shaped metal ring out of whatever is handy (aluminum is good). Place the ring over the armature and energize the solenoid, but NOT WHILE LOOKING DOWN ON IT! The AC field will induce a current in the ring that has it's own magnetic field. The thing is, these fields will always repulse each other, so the ring will usually make a very satisfying dent in the ceiling. This is Lenz's second law in action. The repulsion coil is very easy to make,good for understanding "back emf" on motors, transformers, etc. And LOTS of fun!
BillyDoc
i had a great time as a senior in high school when my physics teacher taught us the "monkey gun":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxvsHNRXLjw
maybe not a LHC, but you could make a home-made cloud chamber. They make for nifty live demonstrations and you could even do interesting things like rig a digital camera CCD to it and try to figure out the energies of detected particles.
During his lecture about heat, my physics teacher would take a coin out of his pocket and place it on the table saying, "All of the molecules of this coin are in random motion. If they all moved the same way at the same time the coin would jump off the table. But the odds of that happening are astronomically small". Then the coin would jump off the table.
I had a pair of very good professors for freshman physics in college. They were heavily into using computers to simulate the classic experiments; we had several labs where we would build computer simulations using VPython (http://vpython.org/) and then compare the results generated by the simulation with the data generated in the original laboratory experiments.
Of these projects, my favorite was the Rutherford gold-foil experiment, a.k.a. Geigerâ"Marsden experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger-Marsden_experiment). The simulation basically involved floating an "atomic nucleus" in space and then firing "alpha particles" at the nucleus with a uniformly-distributed random offset in the y-axis. Running a thousand alpha particles past the nucleus and then plotting their vertical displacement when the horizontal displacement exceeded a meter gave a stiatistical distribution matching the original experiment.
But the interesting trick to the whole simulation: running it slowly made it easy to see the alpha particles deflect as they interacted with the electric field of the gold nucleus. But cranking the rate of simulation up until several alpha particles were created and deflected per second created an interesting visual effect: the particles were no longer bending away from the nucleus, they were bouncing off of an invisible "surface" of average minimum distance. For me, this was the first time I gained an intuitive grasp of the relationship between electric fields and the reason I can't pass my hand through a table's surface.
These sorts of experiments are subtle and difficult to reproduce with real instruments, but their results are profound. I highly recommend computer simulation to iron out the complexities of real-world hardware.
Take care,
Mark
There is a solution...
...measure the building's shadow, and use the like-triangles rule.
Have them produce a model for how Mari Kimura (and others) produce subharmonics (pitches lower than the fundamental pitch of a string.)
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
Measure big G.
It might seem boring but it was one of the most awe inspiring experiments I ever did in lab.
To be able to actually measure the attraction between two big balls (not the cough! cough! kind!) in the laboratory was priceless.
It's not easy to do well either...
(V)THC
That would be quite interesting for chemistry classes.
How about something with Mentos and Diet Coke and either measuring power output or as a source (like to power LEDs)--or would that be too simplistic?
The Millikan experiment (measuring the charge on an electron) is a fun project. I recall that it took us about 32 hours of lab time to successfully measure the charge 5 times. It requires a specialized device but I'm sure it is available in most physics classrooms. Millions have recreated the findings thru routine college physics labs. I found it quite exciting and satisfying.
Here is a simple experiment that might meet your needs. An external cavity laser built with a laser diode tunable with a piezo element and a diffraction grating. Good mix of theory and practice. Hands-on but not too difficult. Here's the paper:
http://www.physics.purdue.edu/~durbin/Reports/AtomTrapping/Prenger1.pdf
Build an ion (or flame) speaker set. Basically, the idea is that you ionize the air between two electrodes so as to create a current path in the air, and the resulting vibrations in the ions due to the varying voltage placed on the electrodes make sound. villanova's explanation I know it can be done by lighting a fire between the two electrodes, and I'd imagine that you could also pulse ultra-high voltages between two normal electrodes, sort of like a highly controlled tesla coil.
The coolest demonstration that I ever saw, though, was when my professor showed me a water bridge this past November. He bought some exceedingly pure ($50/gallon) water and a 40kV power supply, filled two beakers to not-quite-overflowing with the water, places two electrodes (I think butter knives) in the water, and turns on the power. He then brought the two beakers into contact with one another so that the water from one beaker flowed into the other, and when he tried to separate them, the water formed a bridge from one beaker to the next, suspended in the air, several centimeters long. Apparently the math was not only beyond the scope of the course, but actually beyond the capabilities of Maple. According to my professor, anyway, the "highly ordered microstructures" mentioned in the original researcher's work are bull, but I was too much in awe of what I'd just seen to actually understand what he was saying.
I fun one I hear about once was an assignment to make a perpetual motion machine. the challenge was to make a machine that would move for as long as possible. The class would see how close to perpetual motion they could get; how long each of their machines can keep going after being set loose. Its simple, measurable, and generates a huge range of creativity. You'll have to limit the rules in a very legalese fashion, banning chemical energy is a good start.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
the car battery with two non led lights in series and then in parallel
VERY careful measurements - how come the results do not agree with high school teaching? This one is really tougher than it looks
measure the spacial occupancy of the atom using oil film on water (like the Greeks)
measure the charge on the electron using capacitor plates
double slit electron experiment
attempt to do a light gate
when light passes through your hand, you get just glow, since multipath is messing things up.
ONLY look at the FIRST photons and take a light "x-ray" photo non-radioactive X-ray?
demonstrate the Casimir effect re zero point energy
Taken as given : speed of light ; wavelength to energy-per-photon relationship ; that simple LEDs emit light of one specific colour (you need to choose your LED with due care and check it's emission wavelength) ; that (electrical) power is the product of voltage and power.
Needs : a darkroom ; ammeters and voltmeters, the better the better ; ripple-tank ; standard kit for demonstrating photo-electric effect.
Days one and two are interchangable.
Day 1 : Photo-electric effect ; show that photons deliver their energy as packets and are thus particles. If you've time, and an appropriate biology lab, you can also show that visual pigments require light of a certain minimum frequency to operate. That you can see red LEDs ties in with this minimum
Day 2 : Interference effects ; show how waves interfere with each other, including a demonstration of a double-slit experiment in a water tank. A more mathematical day's work than previously.
Day 3 : build your optical double-slit experiment using a red LED as a light source, and measuring the power it draws ; turn the power on the LED down until you can only just make out the interference pattern (record both voltage and current, just for completeness). Repeat for as many you have in your experimental group, and as many times as you can to build up a corpus of results to show the minimum power at which the interference pattern can be observed with a non-integrating detector (i.e. eyeball, Mk-I).
Finally, analysis. You have the power of the LED at which the interference pattern is still visible ; this gives you the number of photons per second forming the interference pattern. Speed of light gives you the spacing between photons while they're in flight (assuming it's not 'bursty'). At some point your students should realise that they are seeing the pattern of one photon interfering with another photon which has not yet left it's source. Wave-particle duality.
If you have time, you could indulge in looking at the experiment's problems. All the electrical power of the LED is assumed to go into the light, but if some goes into heating the LED, then that means that the light flux from the LED is lower, and the photons are spaced further apart. Maybe one photon has left the room before the one it interferes with forms at the LED? Is the LED "bursty"? Well, that's a whole set of other experiments. They're not going to fit into 3 days. Oh, actually, did you mean 3 working days, or 3 full days? And how many hours in your working day?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
1. Have them ask questions about what they really want to know about the physical world.
2. Have them think about how they could begin to answer them.
3. Then build, measure and calculate.
I have a design for a large solar concentrator called: The Solar Forge http://www.charm.net/~jriley/energy/solarforge.html It is easy to build (particularly in small sizes) and very popular with students as it has great potential for use in developing countries. Tests are needed to compare various cheap reflecting surfaces to calculate the best cost to heat delivered ratio. Get back to me for details.
Tom Riley TomRiley@woodwaredesigns.com http://woodwaredesigns.com/woodware.html
Create two circuits of DC currrent.
Rotate the magnetic fields above and below a 10 Kilogram mass (Non metallic) suspended by a wire in between two scales.
Use a pen laser that can shoot through the hole of the mass with a photometer on the other side.
At what point does the object become lighter or heavier? At what strength does the mass move to the point it is detected by the Photometer?
What is the relationship between the mass, its measured weight, the distance moved, the strength of the magnetic field and the amount of applied power?
Can be done with about $1000 bucks in parts.
I gurantee you will have your profs scratching their heads over that little experiment.
Well, at least until THEY come and take it away anyway.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.