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Asked by milliemc to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by picko12, blackbladedragolao64, amyymae.
Question: have you ever invented anything?
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Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 12 Mar 2012:
I have a bit of a patent (which is something that says I’ve invented something, I suppose). It’s for cleaning Carbon Nanotubes (tiny carbon tubes) by putting them in a microwave. No, really.
The microwave burns the junk we don’t want, whereas the nanotubes tend not to get as hot, and don’t burn as much. It’s really simple, but seemed to work quite well.
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Robert Thompson answered on 12 Mar 2012:
I haven’t invented anything, hopefully at some point in the future I’ll invent something cool.
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Suzanne McEndoo answered on 12 Mar 2012:
I came up with a new way of making an atom change the direction it’s rotating, or even make it rotate in two directions at once. It hasn’t been done in a lab yet though (just with maths), so I’m not sure it counts as inventing something.
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James Boone answered on 12 Mar 2012:
I haven’t invented anything materialistic that can be “touched”. During my research I did come up with a mathematical parametric equation that allows me to transform a flat layer of graphene into a folded structure. Then I had to write a computer program to do the maths for me. It was very satisfying once it was completed.
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Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 12 Mar 2012:
I contributed to the invention of a protein microarray whilst I was an undergraduate. It’s basically a method of looking at how thousands of different proteins interact by printing them on a glass slide. Some of the proteins are tagged with a molecule that glows when exposed to laser light so we can check for the interactions. It was pretty satisfying the first time it lit up.
Comments
blatantlyninja commented on :
@ Suzanne, how can an atom rotate in 2 directions at once? Is it anything to do with the spins of electrons?
Suzanne commented on :
@blatantlyninja You can have electrons with two different spins at once (being in two, or more, different states at once is called a superposition), but in this case it was literal rotation, the atom actually turning around and around. So the atom was turning *both* clockwise *and* anticlockwise at the same time. Of course, we can’t look at something turning two directions at once, that doesn’t make sense in our (classical) world. When we look at the atom, it becomes one or the other (we say the wave form collapses) so we only see one direction of rotation, but until you look it’s really doing both.
This is one of those crazy things of quantum physics. There’s no real way of imagining it properly because we’re used to a different set of rules. We actually have a quote from a famous physics about quantum physics: “shut up and calculate”. What he meant was that we have to do the maths and see where it takes us. Quantum physics is based on a particular maths structure that allows us to make predictions, even if we can’t get a feeling for what’s really going on in the middle.
Sorry, that probably sounds like a cop out answer, but quantum physics is actually an incredibly successful theory. It’s made all sorts of crazy predictions that seem to make no sense, but experiment after experiment have supported it. There’s some stuff that Einstein predicted in the 1920’s that weren’t possible in the lab until 1995, that’s how powerful the maths was.
blatantlyninja commented on :
Something turning in both directions is quite hard to get my head around, but I think I follow. When you say the waveform collapses, is this the probability wave? And is the probability wave the mathmatical wave that tells an atom whether it should behave as a wave or a particle?
Definitely not a cop out, thanks for giving it a shot =]