Category Archives: Experiments

If Only Ensign Pulver Had Known

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(OK, that was making fake “Red Label” Scotch)

We already know you can check your wine and find out if it’s bad

Now there’s How to make cheap wine taste like a fine vintage

The secret this time is an electric field. Pass an undrinkable, raw red wine between a set of high-voltage electrodes and it becomes pleasantly quaffable. “Using an electric field to accelerate ageing is a feasible way to shorten maturation times and improve the quality of young wine,” says Hervé Alexandre, professor of oenology at the University of Burgundy, close to some of France’s finest vineyards.

University of Burgundy. Figures. They don’t do this kind of work at Boone’s Farm State University, or Ripple Tech.

Fore!

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Researchers Observe Magnus Effect in Light for First Time

The Magnus effect can be observed in a wide range of systems. It describes, for example, the sideways force a spinning ball feels as it travels through the air, which explains why a baseball pitcher’s curveball curves, and why a badly hit golf ball slices. Light waves, which are made up of massless particles called photons, have their own version of spin. Light’s spin depends on whether its polarization, or direction of wave vibration, rotates in one direction or in the opposite direction as it travels. The Magnus effect for light (also called the spin Hall effect) causes the light to deflect due to the interaction between the light’s spin and shape of the light’s trajectory.

Mirror, rorriM

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Landmarks: Breaking the Mirror

Symmetry is a cherished principle in theoretical physics. For example, the mirror reflection of any physical process appears to operate according to the same laws as its real-world counterpart. So it was a huge surprise in the 1950s when researchers showed in the Physical Review that mirror symmetry doesn’t always apply. They found that reactions involving the weak nuclear force, such as the radioactive decay of cobalt-60, can violate parity conservation, as the mirror symmetry is known. The discovery marked the abrupt introduction of symmetry breaking into fundamental physics.

Toil and Trouble

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More bubbles in microgravity

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I find it interesting that, contrary to terrestrial experience with drops on a surface, the colliding drops tend to scatter rather than coelesce. In microgravity the drops are spherical, which is the minimum-energy configuration, so I expect this presents an activation barrier of sorts. The collision needs to be strong enough to perturb the shape of the drops, so that combining them doesn’t represent a configuration that requires more energy than is present.

The Billy Preston Effect

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Will it Go ‘Round in Circles?

Building The Amazing Steam Candle

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This is a variant of the pop-pop engine — if you point the tubes parallel rater than in opposite directions, you’ll get linear propulsion.

At first glance you might think this couldn’t work. Once you hit steady-state, the rate at which water enters and exits the tube has to be equal. Inside the tubes, that means that the momenta must be equal in magnitude, but opposite in direction, meaning no net momentum for the water, and no propulsion for the boat. The effect is a little more subtle — one has to consider what happens at the entrance to the tube. The water exiting will have its velocity vector along the direction of the tube. But the incoming water is drawn from different directions; it only has to have a component of its velocity in the direction of the tube, meaning the ejected water exerts a greater force.