(Image: Getty)
What do you do when the money’s too short to run your expensive experiment? Reach for the duct tape, ping pong balls and taco sauce
Friday night flying frogs
In 1996, Andre Geim was a junior professor at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. His day job was teasing out the magnetic properties of superconductors, but he itched to investigate a more basic question: could you make water magnetic?
Advertisement
The textbook answer was no. “But sometimes if something hasn’t been done before, you have to do something,” says Geim. “Sometimes something ridiculously simple.” For him, late one Friday evening, that something turned out to be pouring water into his lab’s mighty 20-Tesla electromagnet.
It could all have gone disastrously wrong, but the dancing balls of levitating water that Geim saw in the electromagnet’s core provided all the answer he needed. In a dense enough field, water droplets were magnetic – and you could use that to counteract gravity. Geim later honed the technique to levitate a small frog using the magnetism of its bodily fluids, earning himself the dubious honour of an for “improbable research” in 2000.
Geim had the last laugh, though. In 2002, another Friday-night experiment – this time at the University of Manchester, UK – led to his most celebrated discovery: graphene. This material, with astounding conduction properties, is made from single layers of carbon atoms. When conventional methods of abrading atomic layers from a graphite block failed, Geim and his colleague Konstantin Novoselov resorted to ripping them off with sticky tape and incorporating the resulting flakes into electrical circuits using silver paint.
Graphene looks set to revolutionise future electronic devices, and Geim and Novoselov earned the real Nobel prize in physics for their breakthrough in 2010. Not every dabbler would be so lucky, though. “It was garage tinkering,” says Geim. “But garage tinkering by someone who after his garage has a highly equipped lab.”
Having a ball
The Large Hadron Collider, the particle smasher located near Geneva, Switzerland, that found the Higgs boson last year, is a machine of superlatives. Its colliding proton beams travel in a near-perfect vacuum, and are bent into a circular path by superconducting magnets cooled to within a whisker of absolute zero.
This cooling causes the accelerator ring to contract, so individual sections are connected by concertina-like “bellows” that absorb the movement while maintaining the vacuum within. It was only after several thousand of these components had been put in place that it became clear that some of the metallic sections were buckling out and obstructing the beam line. But which ones?
After some head-scratching, someone came up with the perfect improvised solution, says Steve Myers, who was in charge of the accelerator’s development at the time. A ping-pong ball was just the right size to fit in the tube, where it could coast through the vacuum at a stately couple of metres per second until it hit an obstruction.
The slightly more technical part of the plan was to fit the ping-pong balls – nicknamed “Sputniks” – with radio-frequency tags to record their position as they bounced off the faulty components. But even that proved superfluous: the ball could be heard clipping off obstacles as it passed through. “We got a guy to follow on a bike as the ball was going through the sector and he just said ‘yep… yep… yep…’,” says Myers. The technique of “passing the ball” is still used to check that the LHC beam line is clear.
Particle fizzics
Ping-pong balls aren’t the only unexpected objects inside particle accelerators (see left). Soluble aspirin tablets were regularly used to check for water leaks in the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. Each pill held open a switch. During a leak, it would dissolve under the drip, causing the switch to trip, which cut off the electrical supply before damage could occur.
Sticky situation
Secret agent MacGyver’s love of duct tape is well known – NASA’s, less so. A roll of the trusty black sticky stuff apparently , most famously being used to patch up a filtration system that allowed the Apollo 13 crew to return safely to Earth.
Pass the sauce
Beyond duct tape, the list of quick fixes employed by NASA is truly frightening – or inspiring, depending how you look at it. The most peculiar, leaked to New Scientist in 2001, has to be the use of taco sauce to secure free-floating debris on the International Space Station.
Hitching a lift
This year, Yannick Bidel and his colleagues at the French National Aerospace Research Centre in Paris needed a variable-gravity environment to test their highly sensitive cold-atom gravimeter. Not having one, they popped next door and commandeered of a 40-metre tower block.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Shoestring physics”
