the GF saw this article about an MIT physics professor on the front page of the NYtimes, and spend 30 minutes trying to find the video of the guy demonstrating the principle of a constant period of oscillation for a pendulum, just because it was an old guy swinging on a pendulum.
yawn. every university has the obligatory wacky "science as performance art" physicist.
but here was a demonstration i hadn’t seen before. electricity extracted as if by magic from a drop of water!! why, it’s virtually unprecedented!
it took a little while to figure out how it works, but this guy seems to have a good handle on the concept.
if i can summarize the important points, the waterdrops from the two spigots start off with near equal charge, but the charge on the two rings they pass through are not quite equal, somewhere on a subatomic level they have slightly different quantities of electrons. this miniscule original charge on the rings draws charge off the water as it drops (the force of gravity impelling the change in charge). then the imbalanced charge in the waterdrop is added to the opposite charge of the opposite ring.
The trick is, the water has to be dripping, so that each drop is insulated from every other, otherwise they would short out and re-balance the charge.
on a side note, you know what’s really silly? my blog post from earlier this week is now the highest hit for a google search on my grandfather, a man who has spent his life in the service of the less fortunate. also, it’s the third hit for a canadian mayor with a similar name.
google ain’t fair.
