DIY science is the perfect way to use your creative skills and learn something new. With the right supplies, some determination, and a curious mind, you can create amazing experiments that open up a whole world of possibilities. At home-made laboratories or tech workshops, makers from all backgrounds can explore new ideas by finding ways to study their environment in novel ways – allowing them to make breathtaking discoveries!
Volkswagen’s Fun Theory Awards aims to incentivize socially useful behaviors by making them into games. Previously, their funds have produced a bottle recycling machine played like a video game, a trashcan that behaves like a bottomless pit, and a public staircase turned into a piano keyboard (See links, below).
The Brookstone Beer Bulletin tipped us off to the fact that brewer Trumer Brauerei of Berkeley, CA, has created a fun video featuring a Rube Goldberg device made from Trumer product and paraphernalia. The Trume Pils Rube Goldberg Machine! Inspired by the Rube-Goldberg-Machine we were able to recreate the brewing process in a new way. […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Back in March, this column showed a 3D Hilbert curve made of 64 PVC plumbing elbows arranged in a 4x4x4 cube. Chaim Goodman-Strauss has since outdone himself with an 8x8x8 cube of 512 steel elbows that he made with Eugene Sargent: It is springy, but strong enough […]
calculus-book-cover.jpgMy buddy Trent Johnson, who works for AMD here in Austin, made this beautiful object. I was standing awkwardly in the corner at his birthday party last weekend, trying to remember how to interact with flesh-and-blood people on a face-to-face basis, when I looked down and saw it leaning against the wall next to me. And I immediately recognized it from the cover of my college calculus text, from the flyleaf of which I now quote:
A comment on this morning’s cometarium post reminded me of this famous axiom in the history of science: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” Stigler’s Law is named for University of Chicago statistician Stephen Stigler, who attributes it to sociologist Robert K. Merton. [Thanks, Rahere!]
As evidence, nothing beats one’s own senses: I’ll have to see that for myself. But some experiments are too expensive, too time-consuming, or too dangerous for most folks to reproduce on their own, and for these, well, the next best thing is video. And the tubes are rich with great footage of phenomena that have to be seen to be believed. Here’s a sampling of some of the gems we’ve covered, over the years, to get you started.
This mechanical model of a comet’s orbit, based on the action of elliptical gears, is dated to 1766, and is housed at Harvard’s Putnam Gallery. From which:
This apparatus was designed to demonstrate how the speed of a comet varies in its orbit according to Kepler’s law of equal areas. The comet Benjamin Martin chose for this instrument is Halley’s Comet, which goes around the Sun every 75 1/2 years. Martin began producing cometaria before Halley’s Comet made its predicted return, and so was betting that Halley would prove correct in his theory.
Interestingly, the device turns out to be not an entirely accurate demonstration of Kepler’s second law. Physicist Martin Beech of the University of Regina has studied the history and mechanics of cometaria at great length. His clearinghouse page is an excellent source of detailed information.
