For my Junior Independent Study, I looked into some cool physics videos to find an interesting topic to explore. I found a youtube video about the University of New Mexico Couette cell apparatus for demonstrating laminar flow and decided that watching fluid blend together and then separate out again was an interesting concept. The project I designed was to bring this apparatus to the College of Wooster and then experiment with it. I looked into how accurately a line of color could be returned to its original location after being rotated at various angular velocities and if the transition was more accurate at varying depths below the surface of the fluid.
Walking – we all do it. But why do we walk so often? Why doesn’t everyone skip down the block to work?
Aside from that being deemed as weird by society, walking is the most efficient way for people to move on earth due the gravity here. We’ve all experienced this in some way. You probably know that it’s much easier to walk long distances, than to run them. In my Clare Boothe Luce work this year, I confirmed that walking is amazingly efficient by simulating a passive walker that is able to walk down a hill simply through the force of gravity.
My Junior IS study “Building a Passive Robot for Active Learning,” aimed to take this simulation research and create a real passive walking robot (a robot without a motor) out of plastic Tinkertoys. I used a previous study done by a group at Cornell to base my walker design off of and to use as a comparison. When they built their robot in the 1990s, wooden Tinkertoys were mass-produced, but now plastic Tinkertoys are the only financially possible option. I found that the walkers behaved slightly differently due to sensitivity to initial conditions and parameters for passive walkers. Though this difference exists, I proved that it is still possible to create this simple passive walking robot.
The hope is that this walker could be used as an outreach tool at Science Days at the College of Wooster in order to introduce kids to engineering and to make mechanics a more approachable topic to them. This project is a fun way to spark children’s imaginations and learn more about how fascinatingly efficient human movement can be.
This spring, each Wooster Junior physics major undertook a six-week scientific investigation of their own design, as a part of our junior independent study course. Watching their projects come to fruition over the course of the semester was a very rewarding experience for me, and I am happy to announce that each junior prepared a blog post on their project. These will be posted shortly as a series of guest blogs, so please stay tuned!
The tallest structure in the world since 2008, Burj Khalifa (or Khalifa Tower) is the fantasy skyscraper of my childhood. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), with Adrian Smith and Bill Baker as chief architect and engineer, the Burj is aesthetically and structurally magnificent. No single photo can do the Burj justice, but the one below emphasizes the Y-shaped floor geometry that buttresses the central core and the complex spiral pattern of 27 setbacks that decrease the cross section. Crucially, the terraces “confuse the wind” to minimize vortex shedding vibrations, the bane of skyscraper designers.
Over a half-mile high, Burj Khalifa is the world’s tallest building. Photo by Stéphane Compoint.
Last weekend we had another excellent picnic and pie festival at my house. This event has been a tradition since my first summer in our REU program back in 2004. We have outdoor games, eat grilled veggie quesadillas and a variety of sides, and then we have the celebration of pie!
This year’s pie festival happened to fall on the 22nd of July, or 22/7 if you write the date in a European date/month format, or “European pi day” as Dr. Lindner likes to call it. Pi is of course an irrational number and thus cannot be represented by a fraction like 22/7, but it turns out that 22/7 is a reasonably good approximation of pi and has been widely used to simplify calculations, and so holding the pie festival on pi day is particularly sweet.
Fast-paced, no-net badminton! The birdie (bright blue) can be seen in the upper left of the photo.
KanJam action shot
Frisbee in flight!
This year, we had a great assortment of pies, including pecan pie, strawberry-brownie pie, raspberry blueberry tart, chocolate peanut butter pie, pineapple pistachio pie, peach cream pie, sour cherry pie, and shoo-fly pie! I always make several pies (three this year), but the students contribute the rest!
Whew! I think we did have one noble soul attempt to take a slice of all the pies, but I believe he later regretted it. Of the pies that I had the room to try, the pineapple pistachio was my favorite because I hadn’t had a pie like it before, but they were all good!
Last month, I accompanied recent graduate Michael Wolff ’17 to Okinawa, Japan, where Michael presented his senior independent study work as part of an international workshop-style conference for specialists in the field of optical nanofibers.
Optical nanofibers are essentially very thin cylindrical glass tubes– so thin, in fact, that their diameters are comparable in size to the wavelength of the light designed to propagate though them! Glass cylinders can “trap” light inside them due to the phenomenon of total internal reflection. However, the photons that make up light are relativistic particles, and are therefore difficult to localize, so that when the fiber becomes comparable in size to the wavelength of the light, the light “fights back” by leaking out of the fiber in the form of an evanescent field. The net effect is that the light is still guided by the fiber while much or its energy exists outside the cylindrical confines of the glass, like an abacus bead sliding along an abacus. The complex vector field structures of light guided by optical nanofibers, coupled with the relatively high light intensity just outside the fiber surface, make optical nanofibers a very interesting platform for experimentally probing various aspects of light matter interaction. An example of this is an optical “tractor beam”, in which micron-scale transparent objects near the nanofiber surface may be pushed, pulled, rotated, and otherwise spatially manipulated by the energy, momentum, and angular momentum present in the nanofiber light field. In his senior thesis work, Michael theoretically explored the forces on a submicron-sized glass beads due to realistic nanofiber fields which are currently being used in experiments performed by the light-matter interactions group in at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.
Above is a photo of Michael discussing his work with Professor Fam Le Kien, an expert on optical nanofibers who was first author on the Physical Review A paper that inspired Michael’s thesis work. It was a great moment for me to catch them speaking together!
Congratulations to the class of 2017! We caught up with a number of our senior physics majors for a group picture in the “organized chaos” following the commencement ceremony. Best wishes to all our graduates in your future endeavours, and be sure to keep in touch!
A Hill on fire: Using matches, 3D printing, and code as a forest fire analog
to represent Ohio at the 21st Annual Posters on the Hill on April 26, 2017 in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC.
Robin is the first physics major to be selected by CUR and only the third student in Wooster’s history.
We tried to contact Wooster’s Congressman Jim Renacci before going to DC to talk about the importance of undergraduate research but unfortunately, we never got a reply. So, we spend the morning enjoying the Mall.
The poster session was busy and it was a great experience to see undergraduate from across the US and various research areas presenting their projects. Robin was one of three physics majors. The other two were from the University of South Dakota and the Lewis and Clark College in Oregon.
The trip was generously supported by a gift from our 1977 physics graduate John Redfield.
April is a busy month for STEM majors, starting off with Science Day (pics here!), and ending right before exams. The weekend of April 22 was busy as well, as the College hosted the Wooster community Expanding Your Horizons workshop for fifth and sixth grade girls, run entirely by local women in STEM, including many CoW faculty and students. The workshop is composed of various science and math themed activates, each designed to encourage young women to pursue STEM. This year there were more than 20 sessions that the girls could sign up for!
All of the materials are provided in a plastic bag. The bag itself was used in many successful experiments!
Busy planning and building
Last year, I had volunteered for the Humpty Dumpty session, the physics focused session of Expanding Your Horizons. I enjoyed it so much I volunteered again! The goal of the session is to build a protective device for your egg using the limited amount of materials provided. Of course, rainbow markers are also available so you can draw a face on your egg and name it. Some names from this year include Terminator, Survivor, and Scramblable.
Dr. Oliver getting ready to drop Hairy the Egg (yes, that’s Hairy, not Harry)
Off it goes!
After the teams are done building, the eggs inside their devices are brought up to the third floor of Taylor, and dropped to the ground, hopefully safe and sound. Last year was windy, and we had a new record of an egg flying up to the roof and never coming down. Though we did not have any runaway eggs this year, we did have a record number of surviving eggs.
Waiting in suspense
Dr. Oliver, ready to drop an innocent egg from a tremendous height
Egg in flight
And it’s safe!
Fall of Fame for surviving eggs
As a woman in STEM, I wish I had more opportunities like this growing up. The activities themselves are so exciting that I would happily participate even now. But more important, it provides a safe and creative space for young women to experiment science. Before coming to college, all of my science teachers were men, and I have had many, many experiences where I was the only woman in the room. Too many people have had similar experiences. So hopefully, we have encouraged more women to join us in STEM fields!
Wooster March for Science Poster
The end of the Expanding Your Horizons workshop marked the beginning of Wooster’s March for Science, where a diverse group of people, including former Wooster Physics Professor Dr. Garg, gave speeches and stood to raise awareness of the importance of science. As I said at the start, April is a busy month for STEM!
As promised, I’m posting a bit more about my trip to Amsterdam and the Netherlands in general. I was able to work a little sight-seeing in during the working part of my visit. And, I was able to time my visit with my children’s spring break, so my family were able to come and join me for nearly a week of vacation as well.
Outside the Kröller-Müller Museum
One highlight of my sight-seeing was visiting the Kröller-Müller Museum. This museum is inside a national park just outside the village of Otterlo, and contains a huge number of pieces by Van Gogh and many of his contemporaries. It’s rather out of the way and little difficult to get to, but fortunately it is close to Wageningen University so I was able to see it at the end of the day of my visit there. The museum is surrounded by an extensive sculpture garden, and the experience as a whole was wonderful.
While I was in Vienna in the fall, I saw an outstanding exhibit at the Albertina Museum on the development of pointillism, and the way that the ideas of color separation influenced subsequent painters like Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and (my new favorite) van Rysselberghe. As it turns out, a number of the paintings in that exhibit (for example) were on loan from the Kröller-Müller Museum, and the works still at the museum expanded on the shifts in painting style that I had seen earlier. The dynamic brush strokes and distinct blobs of color that many of the artists used are captivating to me.
You can actually view what seems to be the whole collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum online, but of course, there is no comparison to being there and standing in front of the canvas itself, looking at the individual brush strokes.
Arched passage through the great Dom Tower at Utrecht. The tower and the church are no longer connected, since a 1647 tornado!
Canal in Utrecht. Note the service doors for the houses above that open directly onto the canal for deliveries.
During my first weekend there, I was invited to a family dinner by Todd Hufnagel, a professor from Johns Hopkins who was also visiting Peter Schall’s group as part of his sabbatical. This gave me the opportunity to visit Utrecht, about 30 minutes from Amsterdam by train. Despite being so close (by U.S. standards), Utrecht has a very different feel from Amsterdam. I didn’t have a lot of time to explore, but found the Dom Tower (the tallest and oldest church tower in the country) truly impressive. There is no way to capture its scale in a single photo. Walking through the arched tunnel at the base of the tower was quite an experience too, since it seems to funnel the wind, so it was almost difficult to walk!
After dinner with Todd Hufnagel and family
Todd and I had discovered just after we met at Science Park that we had a student in common — my former I.S. student Elliot Wainwright (Wooster Physics ’15) is now a graduate student in Materials Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins, which turns out to be exactly the department that Todd is a professor in! So, after dinner, we took this photo, just to surprise Elliot. It worked.
Windmills at the Zaanse Schans
One of the most popular images of the Netherlands, of course, is the windmill. We visited an outdoor historical village called the Zaanse Schans just north of Amsterdam, which has a number of rebuilt or relocated windmills which are still operating. You can tour each mill and see how it works. My favorite was the oil mill De Bonte Hen which is the one on the right in the photo. I love seeing the ingenuity of mechanized equipment — in this case how flax seeds were ground, warmed, and eventually pressed to create linseed oil, all by harnessing the rotational motion of the windmill.
A Hague clock from about 1657, built according to Huygens’s new design
Also at the Zaanse Schans, there was a compact but absolutely packed museum on clocks and methods of measuring and displaying time. I knew some of the challenges of accurately keeping time, but I had not realized that Christiaan Huygens (of the famous Huygens construction used in optics) had invented the use of the pendulum clock! There were also older clocks that used torsional oscillations to keep time and had no display at all — they only chimed the hour, so you had to wait until the chime to find out what time it was.
Only 80,000,000 micrometers to go!
Another museum we really enjoyed was Micropia, a museum dedicated to life at the microscopic level. Given that microorganisms were first described by Dutch scientist van Leeuwenhoek, this museum seems particularly appropriate for the Netherlands. The museum was amazingly interactive and fascinating. There was wonderful basic science, where you could control the microscopes to see different organisms, and also applications to our daily life, like seeing the colony of bacteria resulting from sampling someone’s calculator or cell phone. We definitely all washed our hands when we left!
Frites! With homemade mayonnaise, satay sauce, and onion.
One of the ways I like to explore a different country is by checking out the local foods. I knew in advance that the frites (what we would call French fries) would be good, but the enormous meringues took me by surprise.
Giant meringues! Seriously giant meringues!
All the tulip varieties you might ever want, at Keukenhof Garden
Finally, I was very excited to see the famous gardens of Keukenhof, with a magnificent spring display of all types of bulbs. The daffodils were in full swing, but outside, only the very earliest tulips were blooming. Fortunately, a huge area of tulips was partially indoors and so already blooming. These displays made me desperately want to plant tulips at my house again. I’ve given up on tulips because the deer always munch them just before they bloom, but maybe I should try again.
Keukenhof Garden
Overall, we were very fortunate with the weather, and had the opportunity to see some beautiful things (art and nature!) and learn a good bit of history during our visit. There are so many things that we enjoyed during our visit that I just can’t include it all here, so feel free to ask me for more information if you are interested!
Early spring, on the canals near the Rijksmuseum
Recent Comments
Thanks, Mark! I enjoy reading your posts as well.
Nice post, John! Thanks for writing these. I always enjoy them.
For my Junior Independent Study, I looked into some cool physics videos to find an interesting topic to explore. I found a youtube video about the University of New Mexico Couette cell apparatus for demonstrating laminar flow and decided that watching fluid blend together and then separate out again was an interesting concept. The project I designed was to bring this apparatus to the College of Wooster and then experiment with it. I looked into how accurately a line of color could be returned to its original location after being rotated at various angular velocities and if the transition was more accurate at varying depths below the surface of the fluid.
Thanks, Mark! I enjoy reading your posts as well.