Collaborate Disseminate
Every high school physics student knows c, or the speed of light, it’s 3 x 10^8 metres per second. More advanced or more curious students will know that this is an …read more Continue reading How Did We Get To The Speed Of Light?
It is hard to remember that a lot of high tech research went on well before the arrival of electronic computers, lasers, and all the other things that used to be amazing but are now commonplace. That’s why we enjoyed [Michel van Biezen’s] two part post on how Michelson computed …read more
We once saw an interview test for C programmers that showed a structure with a few integer, floating point, and pointer fields. The question: How big is this structure? The correct answer was either “It depends,” or “sizeof(struct x).” The same could be said of the question “What is the …read more
“If we can’t build something capable of delivering astronomical levels of energy, perhaps we could instead steal the energy from an astronomical object.” Continue reading The ‘Halo Drive’ Would Shoot Lasers at Black Holes to Explore the Milky Way
Astronomers have been watching the full fallout of a tidal disruption event for years. Continue reading A Black Hole Has Been Shredding a Star Twice the Size of the Sun for 10 Years
There are a number of ways to measure the speed of light. If you’ve got an oscilloscope and a few spare parts, you can build your own apparatus for just a few bucks. Don’t believe the “lies” that “they” tell you: measure it yourself!
OK, we’re pretty sure that conspiracy theories weren’t the motivation that got [Michael Gallant] to build his own speed-of-light measurement rig, but the result is a great writeup, and a project that includes one of our favorite circuits, the avalanche transistor pulse generator.
The apparatus starts off with a very quickly pulsed IR LED, a lens, …read more
A comet traveling faster than any object in the solar system was just ripped apart by the Sun. Continue reading Watch a Comet Crash Into the Goddamn Sun
Experimenting with optics can be great fun and educational. Trouble is, a lot of optical components are expensive. And other support paraphernalia such as optical benches, breadboards, and rails add to the cost. [Peter Walsh] and his team are working on designing a range of low-cost, easy to build, laser cut optics bench components. These are designed to be built using commonly available materials and tools and can be used as low-cost teaching tools for high-schools, home experimenters and hacker spaces.
They have designed several types of holders for mounting parts such as lasers, lenses, slits, glass slides, cuvettes and …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: Optical Experiments Using Low Cost Lasercut Parts
