"Eureka!" Archimedes screamed, then he ran outside naked ...
Every high school physics student knows about Fourier’s Law of Heat Conduction and Hooke’s Law of Elasticity. But not many know that Joseph Fourier lived inside a wooden box in his old age. Or that Robert Hooke’s arch-nemesis, Isaac Newton, hated him so much that he had Hooke’s portrait removed from the Royal Society and tried to have his papers burned. Imagine how much fun science class would’ve been, had these been taught along side all those equations and formulas.
Well, now you can read about the interesting stuff that your school textbooks didn‘t bother to include. In his latest book, Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them, Cliff Pickover takes some 40 eponymous laws of physics and explains the life of the scientists whom these laws are named after. The book is far from a dry listing of scientific formulas - actually, it’s full of quirky trivia and nifty facts about some of the world’s greatest scientists.
Cliff has graciously allowed us to take samples from the book for this article and generously offer personalized copies of the book to 3 lucky Neatorama readers (see below for details).
So, if you didn’t know that Archimedes sometimes sent his colleagues false theorems in order to trap them when they stole his ideas, or that Daniel Bernoulli‘s father threw him out for winning a science competition, then this Neatorama post is for you. Behold, the 5 Scientific Laws and the Scientists Behind Them (no complicated math, we promise!)
1. Archimedes’ Principle of Buoyancy
The Law: According to Archimedes’ principle, a body wholly or partially submerged in liquid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced liquid. This buoyant force depends on the density of the liquid and the volume of the object, but not its shape.
The law seems simple, but it is actually not intuitive that objects with equal volume experience the same buoyant force when held under water: cubes made of cork and lead would experience the same buoyant force, yet would have completely different behavior. This is because the different ratios of buoyant force to object weights.
Archimedes’ Principle of Buoyancy has many applications, including determining the pressure of a liquid as a function of depth. It helps us understand how floatation works and is one of the founding principles of hydrostatics.
The Famous Legend Behind the Law: One day, King Hieron II of Syracuse, Sicily, wanted to find out whether his wreath-shaped crown was actually made from pure gold. He called upon Archimedes to find out (without damaging the crown, say by melting it down). Roman architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius wrote:
While Archimedes was turning the problem over, he chanced to come to the place of bathing, and there, as he was sitting down in the tub, he noticed that the amount of water which flowed over the tub was equal to the amount by which his body was immersed. This showed him means of solving the problem … In his joy, he leapt out of the tub and, rushing naked toward his home, he cried out with a loud voice that he had found what he sought.
Archimedes was able to obtain the exact volume of the crown by dunking it in water and measuring the displaced water. He then took the weight of the crown and divided it by its volume to get the density of the crown, which turned out to be between that of gold and silver. Archimedes was thus able to show that the wreath was not made out of pure gold (and the royal goldsmith was executed).
Modern scholars suggest that this story was bogus, as it would be unlikely that Archimedes had measuring equipment with sufficient accuracy to detect the difference (plus, he hated to bathe - see below).
The Man Behind the Law: Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 B.C.), was a Greek geometer and is often regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians and scientists who ever lived.
Here are a few things about Archimedes you may not know:
- Plutarch wrote that Archimedes was so obsessed with math that his servants had to force him to bathe, and that while they scrubbed him, he continued to draw geometrical figures on his body!
- Archimedes invented a machine called the Archimedean screw to pump water.
- He also invented a “death ray” weapon using a set of mirrors that focused sunlight on Roman ships, setting them on fire. After many scientists discounted the story as false, David Wallace of MIT actually did the experiment: He had his students build an oak replica of a Roman ship and focused sunlight on it using 127 mirrored tiles from a distance of 30 meters. After ten minutes of exposure, the ship burst into flames!
- When the Romans captured Syracuse in 212 B.C., a Roman soldier came upon the mathematician who was studying a mathematical diagram drawn in the sand. Archimedes was annoyed by the soldier’s interruption, and said “Don’t disturb my circles” before he was killed. Moral of the story: don’t piss off a Roman soldier!
2. Hooke’s Law of Elasticity
The Law: Hooke’s Law of Elasticity states that if an object, such a spring, is elongated by some distance x, then the restoring force F exerted by the object is proportional to x:
The k is a constant called the spring constant if the object is a spring.
The Man Behind the Law: Robert Hooke (1635 - 1702) was an English physicist and polymath. As you can see, Hooke was an ugly man (he was severely disfigured by smallpox). (Photo: Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You)
Here are a few things about Hooke you may not know:
- Robert Hooke was a sickly child and wasn’t expected to reach adulthood, so his parents didn’t bother educating him. Left to his own devices, Hooke made mechanical models and clocks.
- He was the first to coin the word “cell” to describe the basic unit of life (he thought that plant cells, when magnified through a microscope, looked like “cellula,” the living quarters of monks).
- Hooke was a busy man: he was the Surveyor to the City of London, helped rebuild the city after the Great Fire in 1666, and even designed the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital (“Bedlam”) and the Royal College of Physicians.
- In 1672, Hooke criticized Isaac Newton who used a prism to split white light into its various components. Furious at Hooke, Newton had his portraits removed from the Royal Society and even attempted to burn his papers. Hooke mentioned to Newton about a possible inverse-square principle of gravitation, but Newton didn’t credit Hooke when he published Principia Mathematica, saying "Merely because one says something might be so, it does not follow that it has been proved that it is."
- Hooke was interested in the science of respiration, so he had himself placed in a sealed vessel from which air was gradually pumped out. As you can imagine, the experiment was detrimental to Hooke’s health: he damaged his ears and experienced deafness in the process.
- In 2006, the Royal Society purchased a manuscript by Hooke for $1.75 million, in which he wrote 500 pages of notes recorded during Royal Society meetings. In the notes, Hooke castigated Newton and Robert Boyle for stealing his ideas. He also wrote that Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek found "a vast number of small animals in his Excrements which were most abounding when he was troubled with a Looseness and very few or none when he was well."
3. Bernoulli's Law of Fluid Dynamics (Bernoulli's Principle)
The Law: Imagine fluid flowing steadily through a pipe that carries it from the top to the bottom of a hillside. The pressure of the liquid changes along the pipe, and Daniel Bernoulli discovered the law that relates the pressure, flow speed, and height for a fluid flowing in a pipe. Today, this law is written as:
You may not be aware of Bernoulli's Law, but it has numerous applications in real life: Bernoulli's Law is used when designing the Venturi throat, a constricted region in the air passage of a car motor's carburetor that causes a reduction in pressure, and in turn causes fuel vapor to be drawn out of the carburetor bowl.
The design of airplane wings take advantage of the knowledge we gleaned from Bernoulli's Law: these wings are designed to create an area of fast flowing air on its upper surface, which cause pressure near this area to drop and thus pull the wing upward.
Finally, we've all experienced Bernoulli's Law in action: the shower curtain is pulled inward when water first comes out of the shower because the increase in water and air velocity inside the shower causes pressure to drop. The pressure difference between the outside and inside of the curtain causes it to be sucked inward.
The Man Behind the Law: Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782) was polymath that came from a family of extraordinary Swiss mathematicians. In fact, his father, Johann Bernoulli, and his uncle, Jacob, were famous mathematicians.
Interestingly, both Daniel and his father Johann secretly studied mathematics against the wishes of their respective fathers. Just as Johann's father tried to force him into becoming a merchant, Johann did the same to Daniel. Indeed, Johann had his son's future all mapped out, including whom to marry!
Finally, Daniel told his father that he'd had enough, and both of them came to a truce: Daniel would become a doctor and Johann would personally teach him math.
Here are a few things about Daniel Bernoulli you may not know:
- Johann had always been jealous of Daniel's success. In 1735, after both the father and son tied for first place in a science competition held by the Paris Academy of Sciences, Johann was unable to bear the “shame" of being comparable to his son and threw Daniel out of his house for winning the prize that he felt should've been his alone!
- Daniel published his work on fluid physics in a book titled Hydrodynamica (where we get the word "hydrodynamics" from) in 1734. Johann became jealous of Daniel's work and published his own plagiarized version, Hydraulica … and predated it to 1732 to make it seem that his work appeared before his son's!
- Daniel was a prolific author and wrote on whatever subjects struck his fancy. One of his papers discussed the formula for computing the relationship between the number of oarsmen on a ship and the ship's velocity. In another paper, Daniel wrote what would become the basis of the economic theory of risk aversion and overall happiness gained from goods or services.
4. Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures
The Law: Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures states that the total pressure Pt exerted by a mixture of gases in a container is equal to the sum of the separate pressures that each gases would exert if just that single gas occupied the entire volume of the container.
That may seem trivial, but it's actually one of the more useful gas laws for scientists.
The Man Behind the Law: John Dalton (1766 - 1844) grew in a poor family, was a poor speaker, severely color-blind, and was even considered a crude or simple experimentalist. Yet, he achieved significant professional successes and made great contributions to chemistry, meteorology, and physics.
In the early 19th century, Dalton developed the atomic theory, in which he proposed that each chemical element is composed of atoms of single, unique type and that though these atoms are indestructible, they can combine in simple ratios. For this, many consider Dalton to be the "Father of Chemistry".
Here are a few things about John Dalton you may not know:
- Legend has it that Dalton once bought his mother special stockings for her birthday. The mother, a Quaker woman, was shocked that he would buy her scarlet stockings. Dalton thought that they were blue, and asked his brother … who also saw them as blue! At that point, he realized that both he and his brother were color blind.
- Dalton did the first systematic study of color blindness and wrote the very first paper on the subject. In his honor, color blindness is sometimes called Daltonism.
- Since he was 21, Dalton kept a detailed diary of the weather, and continued to update it until the very day of his death. Dalton was so obsessed with records that he kept meticulous records of hits, misses, and other scores when he played the English game of lawn bowling!
- Dalton never married, saying "My head is too full of triangles, chymical process, and electrical experiments, etc., to think much of marriage."
- After his death, and according to his wishes, one of Dalton's eyes was cut open to determine the cause of his color blindness (Dalton had always thought that it was due to colored fluid inside his eyes - but that turned out not to be the case.) In the 1990s, cellular analysis revealed that the eye lacked the pigment that provides sensitivity to green.
5. Fourier's Law of Heat Conduction
The Law: Fourier's Law of Heat Conduction deals with the transmission of heat in materials. The law states that the heat flux, Q (the flow of heat per unit area and per unit of time), is proportional to the gradient of the temperature difference.
Fourier's Law is used in many diverse areas of science, and it explains why diamonds are cool to the touch (they have high thermal conductivity).
The Man Behind the Law: Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 - 1830) was a French mathematicians and Egyptologist.
Here are a few things about Fourier you may not know:
- When he was only 16, Fourier discovered a new proof of Descartes’ rule of signs. His teenage achievement quickly became standard proof. By the age of 21, however, Fourier was in doubt whether he could ever make a significant contribution to mathematics. He wrote to his professor "Yesterday was my 21st birthday, at that age Newton and Pascal had already acquired many claims to immortality." It’s a good thing Fourier carried on!
- Instead of a career in science, young Fourier seriously considered being a priest. Indeed, he arrived at the Benedictine abbey of St. Benoit-sur-Leoire to prepare for his vows, but left when he realized that he only had one true love: mathematics.
- During the French Revolution, Fourier tried to defend scientists like Antoine Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry. Appeals to spare Lavoisier’s life was cut short when the judge said “The Republic has no need for geniuses” and he was guillotined. Afterwards, Fourier was thrown in prison but managed to escape death when the political climate changed.
- In his work on heat propagation in thin sheets of material, Fourier invented a very useful mathematical tool that would later become known as the Fourier Series. Here, Fourier showed that any periodic function can be represented by a sum of simple sine and cosine oscillating functions.
- Fourier accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. When he returned, Fourier had a strange medical condition: he was always cold and had to wear several overcoats, even in the heat of summer. It’s ironic to think that though he was an expert in heat transfer, Fourier was not good at regulating his own body heat!
- Global warming? Blame Fourier - he came up with the idea that the atmosphere acts as a “translucent dome,” which like a lid of a pot, absorbs some of the heat of the Sun and reradiates it downward to Earth.
- During his last months, Fourier’s body was so frail that he would live inside a wooden box with holes cut out for his head and arms. This “living coffin” would keep his body upright and let him work on his correspondence!
The article above is but a small selection of the amazing trivia and fascinating stories about some of the greatest names in science. If you love science, or would like to instill the love of science to your children, pick up Cliff Pickover's Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them. You won't be disappointed
Links: Archimedes to Hawking Amazon page | The book's website | Cliff's website
On a personal note, this article took way longer than I thought (and I didn't even get to Stephen Hawking!) ... because I ended up reading Cliff's book from cover to cover! It was definitely an interesting read.
Now, like I mentioned above, Cliff has generously offered free copies of Archimedes to Hawking to Neatorama readers with the most interesting experience with science or funny personal story about a science class ... Write yours in the comment section; the best three will win a free personalized copy of Cliff's book (so make it good!)
In my college "Physics for Poets" class, which we always called Physics for Idiots, we were doing an experiment about the propagation of waves, I think. I'm not too sure, as you will see, I've blocked the experience out from my memory as much as I can. The professor had a large section of o-ring gasket, used to seal oil tanks, I believe. This was stretched across the front of the classroom, struck at one end, and we watched the wave propagate back and forth. Now, this classroom was not too big, so it was hard to see the effect that the professor was talking about, so he asked for volunteers to take the gasket out into the hall and duplicate the demonstration, joking how dangerous it was. I jokingly volunteered a friend, and the professor said, okay, so my friend volunteered me right back. We brought the gasket into the hall, stretched it the length of the hall, probably 70 to 100 feet, with two people behind each of us, sort of like a really clueless tug-of-war game. The professor stood at the other end of the hall from my team, and struck the gasket with a ruler. The wave propagated back and forth along the gasket a few times, very impressively, and the next thing I knew I was laying on the ground with a whole bunch of rubber gasket piled up against my guts. The sheer absurdity of the situation, combined with the extreme pain I was in caused me to, when I got my breath back, to laugh very literally hysterically. When the ashen faced professor came up to me, I was able to choke out the words "I'd better get an A for this lab.", which I think I did. I went to the school nurse, who agreed that although it looked really awful to have huge purple bruises, let us say between just above the knees to just below the navel, I did not have any serious internal injuries. The horrifying bruises took about a month to go away completely. Oh, the things I wouldn't do for SCIENCE! Top that!
One of the naughtier boys was chosen by the teacher to light up the wick that leads to a solid Potassium. Not knowing the property of Potassium that reacts strongly to flame, that boy casually litted the wick and waited for something to happen. As expected, the solid Potassium of the size of a small pinch of cheese exploded in rapid reaction and gave all of us a shock. Lol. None of us expected it!
When we settled down, the boy was gone from sight. His friend tried to look for him, and found him 5 minutes later under one of the lab benches shivering and tearing. LOL. Poor guy!
When I left the school, my seniors gave me their generation shirt with the nickname "Tony Celsius" in honor of the most gangster physics name ever invented. Still wear it all the time.
Of course his crowning achievement was when he set the lab on fire by dropping too much potassium into some water which caused a large enough reaction to catch the ceiling on fire... ahh those were the days.
I have the AP physics C exam later this afternoon, and instead of studying I'm reading this awesome site, but NO, fate wants me to learn physics
time to go study simple harmonic motion . . .
I have the AP physics C exam later this afternoon, and instead of studying I'm reading this awesome site, but NO, fate wants me to learn physics
time to go study simple harmonic motion . . .
(sorry if this turns out to be a double post)
As a side note, I am working on my masters in STS, and this article was really appreciated by me.
Also, last year I took a course at uni on biopsychology. Our lecturer used to write poems and songs about neurotransmitters and such. He would sporadically whip out his guitar and sing to the 300 or so students in the hall to illustrate his points. He was also a terrible singer. What a legend!
You can explode a slug in a glass of water. All you have to do is dry it out with some salt first. After you drop it into the water, the cell membranes can't handle the sudden change from shriveled up to immersed. They try to absorb too much water and they burst. This can happen to humans too, in a different way. Football players who have been practicing in extremely hot conditions then may try and go chug like 4 gallons of water and occaisionally one or two dies of massive cell loss.
I've never tried doing that to a slug, so I technically can't say with certainty that it works, but I definitely remember that if nothing else from ninth grade bio. Also the time some kid wrote on his test that an advantage of sexual as opposed to asexual reproduction was that it was fun.
Oh, and in Zoology we had to watch a video about how a certain species of flatworm engages in "penis fencing" (that's actually what it's called, you can look it up) as a mating ritual. The loser gets penetrated and has to bear the eggs and therefore the burden of motherhood.
I eventually went on to a career as a Registered Nurse, and found myself working with a large, multi-person hyperbaric chamber, where patients are exposed to a pressurized environment and given highly concentrated oxygen to breathe (when compressed to three times normal atmospheric pressure, one breath of 100% oxygen contains as many oxygen molecules as three breaths of oxygen at normal pressure).
Part of my job became teaching the principles of hyperbaric medicine to other RNs and hyperbaric technicians. I included discussions of Boyle's Law, Dalton's Law, Henry's Law, Charles' Law, and Gay-Lussac's Law. In my powerpoint presentation, the title of this section of the teaching is:
"Physics 101: All the things you ignored in high school, but now, through some cruel twist of fate, have again become pertinent to your life"
Eventually physics actually became one of our favorite classes and we chipped in some money at the end of the year to buy the teacher some additional vocal dinosaurs.
I only wish we had something of similar value to help me get past Quantum Mechanics in College.
So anyway, teacher was on the other side of the room, and I was bored, so started messing with it, trying to get one long burn mark. It did not occur to me that graphite is in fact quite conductive. Mother Nature kindly reminded me of this fact by sending an incredible electric shock through my body. To describe it as painful may not be quite accurate, but I was sure awake afterwards. I gave a shout of surprise, and my teacher glanced over, and casually mentioned that any equipment that I broke I would have to replace. I don't think she realized what had happened.
the first one is how i independently discovered that radio waves are a type of light when i was little. i finally talked my parent into getting me a pair of walkie-talkies. i taped one into the transmit position and hid it downstairs, then went to my room with the other one. well, downstairs, my dad dropped something and the sound came through the walkie-talkies a split second faster than through the air. that blew my little kid mind.
the second one is a little shorter. for some lesson that i just can't remember, my high school science teacher liked filling a plastic bag with the gas that the bunsen burners run on, letting it float, then setting it on fire. he claims by doing that, he set off the sprinklers in the new building for the first time after they were installed.
One day, and I don't recall the motivation, my physics teacher, Mr. Bellof, thought the spring could support him in a Tarzan-like vine swing maneuver. So he got onto a chair, held onto the spring and jumped. The spring quickly ripped out of the ceiling, and my teacher crashed to the floor. The classroom was chaos as this all happened. For the rest of the year (and the next, I think) there was a hole in the ceiling where the string was attached.
A quick bit extra about my physics teacher(s)...
Both times I took physics (regular and AP), the other teacher was in a class just across the call. These two teachers were the ultimate duo. When the opportunity for an inside joke came up (at least 3 times a day it seems), my teacher would walk near the door and yell (largely incomprehensibly) "Mr. Welter!" Seconds later, the other teacher would come zipping in the door...kind of like Kramer on Seinfeld. They'd engage in their quick joke and the other teacher would dart back to his classroom.
And just one more: One day Mr. Bellof stepped out of the room for a minute, and while he did, a student passing by in the hallway came in and drew a penis shape on the chalkboard. Then he slid the over chalkboard over it and left. When Bellof came back, he continued the lecture, but when he came to need more space on the board, he lifted it and saw the drawing. He stared for a few seconds and said, "Oh, a penis," and continued to write on top of it.
In my book, these were some of the best teachers I ever had. I could go on and on with funny stories.
In fact I just thought of one more...our class went outside for a mini field trip because we were learning about reflection and refraction and were going to see it demonstrated with the sun. After the demo, Mr. Bellof made us drop our books and things, circle up and hold hands. We merrily ran in the circle (like ring around the rosie) and he had us all chant: "We! Are! Physics! Geeks!" It was ridiculous.
I would like to report that I got an “A” in Organic Chemistry- my second time through it.
"Was that sexual harassment?"
I replied: "...little bit?" - just to watch him go green. And then we had a nice laugh.
Flatworms show a distinct lack of consideration for their mates. We imagined what it would be like to be a flat worm female. You could be just minding your own business, swimming along, when suddenly you felt a sharp pain in your side. You look down and to your dismay you see a gaping hole in your belly. Are you mortally wounded? Have you been attacked by a predator? Are you about to be eaten? The answer is no. What has happened is that a male has taken a shine to you and to profess his undying love has punctured you with his hypodermic penis. Congratulations, you're pregnant!
Then we imagined the lazy barnacle. The barnacle has the largest penis to body ratio of any organism. The male barnacle needs this immense length in order to find a female that may be several barnacles away. We thought about what a human male would do with such a penis. Picture a lazy man lying on the couch in his boxers watching TV or perhaps just waking up from a nap. As he sits up, he rubs the drool from his chin and realizes that he is in the mood for some loving. His mate is no where to be seen and he is still feeling sleepy. What should he do? Since he doesn't want to get up he sends his male organ out on the hunt to find his partner, “Honey! Honey are you there? Where are you?”. Love without ever having to leave the couch!
Our favorite was snail foreplay. Snails do not have the benefit of a nice bottle of wine or Barry White to help them prepare their mates for some candooling. So how do you think they tell their mates that they are in the mood? First, they tenderly cuddle up beside each other and then, when the mood is just right .... they shoot each other! That's right, they shoot their beloved in the neck with a dart made of calcium. How's that for smooth?
Now five years later I may not remember the difference between acoelomates, pseudocoelomates and coelomates but I sure do remember their mating habits.
(This instructor also told me about the halcyon days when he would take a coffee can, put a huge chunk of sodium metal in it, then toss it in a lake and shoot it with a shotgun. What I wouldn't give to be a chemist in those days)
I also had a gifted physical chemistry instructor who decided one class period we would go out into the common area and spend the entire period doing the "electron ballet," a dance which involved us running around in circles orbiting each other and exchanging electrons in a weird balletic red rover game. God that class was fun.
Finally (I'm totally cheating by making this a threefer+), during a synthesis class, a classmate of mine had to generate hydrochloric acid gas. The way you do this is by VERY slowly dropping hydrochloric acid into sulfuric acid. This generates an insane amount of heat, but if you do it slowly and ice the reaction vessel, usually it's no problem. This guy turned the stopcock on flask holding HCl a bit too fast. Immediately he knew there was a problem, so he slammed his fumehood shut. Within about 5 seconds, his entire glassware setup and anything else that was under the hood essentially vaporized. Needless to say, the lab instructor was not happy.
These are just tidbits. I graduated from an engineering school, and environment which breeds just about the weirdest and most brilliant professors and classmates.
In first grade, during recess one day, I decided to try something I'd been curious about. Most of the kids in the class had just figured out how to push themselves on the swing set, and I became fascinated with the motion of the swing, particularly how the ropes seemed to go slack the closer the swinger got to the top of the swing set. I decided to try and recreate the effect on the monkey bars. The monkey bars ran perpendicular to the base of a small hill on the playground, and I decided the best way to do this would be to run down the hill at full speed, jump and grab onto one of the bars and swing up, hoping to feel my arms go slack like the ropes. It worked, to a certain point. I ran down the hill, jumped, grabbed the bar, and successfully swung up so that my body was now parallel with the ground, around six feet in the air. And just as I'd predicted, my arms went slack... and then I lost my grip and fell flat on my back; it knocked the wind right out of me. When I got back to class, I asked the teacher to explain what happened, as it was a Montessori school, she sat down and explained (in very general terms) centripetal force, motion along a curved path, and (unfortunately) gravity. It was then I knew I wanted to study physics.
The second story concerns a college professor, he taught both the quantum mechanics courses at the university I attended. He is a great professor, but he had all these quirky sayings and terms, and used an odd system of units (the speed of light was always 1, to make the math easier, and time was measured in some variation of inverse joules.) One day each semester, someone in the class would create a bingo sheet, with one of his phrases or terms or lines in each box, and the whole class would play bingo during his lecture, without his knowledge, at least until someone stood up and shouted, "bingo!"
I kept this up the next semester until spring rolled around with its obligatory bee activity. I got another jar and put a label on it with "Synth March 9- No.114- coAMp + gCNA” and put a living bee in it. I heard my neighbor out I the hallway and I yelled "YES!" and then ran out the door leaving it open. Naturally, he entered my room and saw the living bee in the jar and thought I had actually synthesized a bee.
I also left out a notepad with drawings and scribbles to make it look like I was attaching a small camera and microphone on Frankenbee114 and had notes about working with Kyle in the EE department.
He was so flipped out that he wouldn’t talk to me anymore and I heard he was telling people he was nervous about his neighbor (me) and what he (I) was working on. I kept this up until the end of the school year when I came clean with him. It took me two weeks to convince him that Frankenbee114 was really 5 or 6 bees I kept catching and putting in the same jar to prank him.
In my senior lab, my friend and I had to do a project using 123 (high temperature) superconductors. We decided to take some of the liquid nitrogen and pour it into a 20-ounce plastic bottle. After taking it outside, my friend screwed on the lid and threw the bottle into some bushes. Next thing we know, the plastic bottle cap came flying out of the bushes (along with a bunch of leaves) and pegged my friend in the forehead. He had a small welt for the next two days. The only thing he could do that night was drink while everyone else laughed their butts off.
"Oh, shoot!" she said, "That was sodium."
Genius that she was, my teacher decided to use that as another part of her lesson. She filled a beaker with water and dumped it into the sink.
BOOM.
The water pipe exploded.
She's still teaching there, unfortunately.
To begin with, he has an obsession with chocolate, especially M and M's. We were always told to imagine electrons as green M and M's, and he would include these on his powerpoint presentations. Also, he had tons of little sayings to help us remember things. The best thing about him was how confident he was with himself. He would make fun of himself and the students, and we returned in kind. If we didn't know the answer to a question, he would say, "Yes? No? So's your momma?" (To which we replied the latter, of course.)
Most importantly, he taught us the three answers to life: bonding structures, molecular mass, and chocolate.
Of course, this triggered the fire alarm for the entire school. So he we were, laughing and carrying on, while all the other kids were evacuating as orderly as possible, the teachers had looks of "there's not a fire drill scheduled," and the principal, in a panic, sprinted down the outside stairs towards our classroom to see if his school was going up in flames.
I think the burning sugar experiment was suspended after that.
My freshman General Chem lab was a total disaster most days. One day stands out in particular. My group of friends in that lab had gotten the reputation of being the last to understand stuff, bugged the teacher with the most questions and were always the last ones out of the lab. We called ourselves the “speds” (special ed kids). This one day it was the end of class and we were supposed to finish up our experiments and clean up…our professor stepped out for a few minutes. One of my lab partners was quickly trying to heat a test tube over the Bunsen burner and it exploded on her, and another lab partner got startled by the sound and dropped the teachers stapler, which he had been holding, into a vat of waste chemicals. Meanwhile I had walked over to the sink to dump out my test tube, not realizing that the waste product was supposed to be collected into a separate container, and when it hit the water in the bottom of the sink it created this purple smoke cloud. I was panicking not knowing if I had just created some toxic gas. (I don't remember what experiment we were working on) All this happened pretty much simultaneously, and our professor waked back into the room right in the middle of it. He just gave us this priceless look that told us he though we would all have bright futures as Wal-Mart greeters. Luckily we survived all those years of chem labs and our many other screw-ups, and now one of us is a science teacher, one is a physical therapist and I am the assistant manager of a toxicity lab.
This is not a really great story, but it's one of my proudest moments. :)
My first hour class my senior year of high school was Physics. By the last quarter of the year, to combat the "senioritis" that had set in, our teacher offered a prize to whoever could make it to class on time every day for that whole last quarter. My best friend and I were able to accomplish that feat (no small achievement when the classroom was across the school from our lockers), and we were the proud recipients of "I (heart) physics" bumperstickers. Mine is still on my guitar case, over a decade later.
Thank you to Cliff for his generous offer and to everyone for the great comments!
To help astronauts stay in 1 spot they put in a steel mesh floor whereby a square plug fastened to their boots to push into that floor mesh. Women use a suction device with a vacuum nozzle when they had to go.
The animal detritus was also eventually vacuum suctioned when they perfected devices that work in space. These were actually gravity creating devices designed to work in non-gravity, a truly masterful piece of practical engineering.
From what I was told at Redstone Arsenal where they train astronauts in how to function in weightlessness, one task was to swim and defecate into a diaper. Try it some time, it ain't as easy as it sounds. But that is how astronauts learn how to solve non-gravity problems.
That apparently wasn't good enough, so our teacher decided to demonstrate issues of scale. He kitted us out with face masks and riot shields (don't know where he got those, and I'm not interested in exploring how he got them for legal reasons), picked up his jar of sodium and other bits and pieces and took us down to the teacher's car park in front of the school.
With mechanical long tongs and effusive warnings for us not to ever do this (ever ever), he dropped a much larger piece of sodium into a beaker of water. The results were one large bang, a small mushroom cloud rising into the air, the apparent disintegration of the plastic beaker and a small portion of the tarmac, a former-English teacher principal peering out the school office window and our science teacher screaming "COOL LETS DO THAT AGAIN WITH HCl!!!"
We didn't. The principal came out and had words with him about OH&S and nice new cars and so on. So we went back to the classroom with him muttering about, next time using Potassium or maybe Lithium all the way.
Issues of scale came up again and again and again that year, it's honestly a wonder none of us were killed that year. Great teacher, though. He retired the year after, but I met him at a train station once and he still has a crazy glint in his eyes.
I'm a teacher now partially due to his inspiring me. I work full time with gifted students who are much more devious than he ever was and probably much smarter than I ever was. Every day I take my life and my health/accident insurance policy in my hands.