In Demo Veritas

Ig Nobel Moments of Science

The Ig Nobel Awards Ceremony is happening tonight at 7:15 in Sanders Theater at Harvard University.   My friend and co-conspirator Joost and I will once again don our lab coats as Performing Scientists, and perpetrate two Moments of Science.

Each Moment of Science is a one minute science demonstration, presented and acted out on stage.  As with the IgNobel prizes, the goal is to make people laugh, and then think.

The ceremony is streamed live at http://improbable.com.

Moment number one is a presentation of the kinetic molecular simulator otherwise known as the Golfball Atmosphere.  I mentioned it in the last post.  Some of our best Moments come from the recent demonstrations done for physics classes.  This time, it uponned my mind to use this demo just as we were meeting to rehearse the second.  I was despairing of the first choice.  We planned to somehow put a whole bunch of pre-set, Victor mousetraps on a surface and throw ping pong balls at them to set them off.  Aside from an impractical set up, long and risky, it just wasn’t going to work very well.   A good argument for coming up with ideas for performances after a few beers is those practicalities are swept away in a cheery glow.

Walking through the basement toward the lecture halls, I pictured the Golf ball Atmosphere, and I knew it was the right choice.  I showed it to Joost, and he agreed.  Simple, loud, bright and fast moving.   I’d better go and clean it.  The ceremony starts in a few hours.

The second Moment is inspired by Roy Glauber’s demonstration of a Tesla coil for Science A29.  The coil is small, about a meter tall.  The high voltage source is on the bottom of a cart, with the Tesla coil on top.  Rolled out and  plugged in with a flourish, it bursts into action with a loud buzz and blue sparks.  A spark gap in front breaks down and the primary coil rings with the glass plate condenser, and the secondary, a tall tube wrapped in fine wire, is driven at about a megaHertz, a few hundred thousand volts of AC voltage.  Enough to light a fluorescent light tube.  The current flows from the top of the light tube to the nearest hand, thence over the skin and to ground.  By moving that hand up and down, the lit part of the bulb changes in length.  So I will be stroking the glow bar.  Huh huh huh.  Fortunately, masturbatory humor is practically required at the Ig’s.  We hope to have the V-Chip censor flag us down and stop the Moment before it gets out of hand.  Huh huh huh.

Anyway, it is all going live on the web at 7:15 pm tonight, Thursday October 1st, 2009.