April 26, 2005

The experimental physicist's day...

Today we did a very exciting experiment. In the morning we first went through a ton of theory and did some numerical calculations. I wish Jop the theory-freak would have been here to help us! After all this tough work - our heads were glowing because we had to think so hard - it paid out and we got groundbreaking results. It will take us some time to analyze the data in detail, but the coarse overview which we gained already at first glance allowed us to predict a little revolution in low temperature bio-physics. We are looking forward to improve our results in the future by further refining our sophisticated experimental setup.

Excited? OK, here's what we did:

At first we boiled it... at 77 Kelvin. Watch the nitrogen droplets spraying out of the dewar!

Ready! It almost stopped boiling, which means it's cold enough to do the experiment...

Albion, head of our research group. He is prepared to conduct the experiment, wearing safety gloves.
He is going to drop our sample with a well defined force (optimum direction and velocity have been derived with our simulations).

Haijun, our superintendent gave
green light for this stunning masterpiece of research in modern physics:

And here it is - the frozen mandarin, broken apart into several fragments.

Our main questions were:

Will the mandarin separate into single fibers and
will these pieces melt after being exposed to sunlight?

In a perfect correspondence with our theoretical predicions the experiment's result is: Yes and Yes!

David Broun's Super-train!

David Broun showed us some cool stuff in his lab today. He's researching on superconductors.

(Video featuring Wendell and Albion)

(sorry, the video went missing)