I have lasers! Today I went to Sydney University and borrowed some of thee lab equipment from the Physics labs, for use in my primary school visit on Monday. I assured the lab technician who organised the loan that I wasn’t going to be borrowing stuff frequently, but he was delighted that I was borrowing it, and said I could have equipment whenever I wanted it. He said it was good that I was doing science with school children, and he encouraged me to get them interested in science. So that was good!
He gave me three lasers, one red, one blue, and one green, as well as a selection of slides with single slits, double slits, triple slits, apertures of various shapes, and a transmission diffraction grating. I’ll have to swot up on my interference and diffraction theory over the weekend so I can run the experiment smoothly and get the kids at school to calculate the wavelengths of the three different lasers during the lesson. It should be fun!
I also caught up with my Ph.D. supervisor while visiting the Physics Department. He’s semi-retired now, but still appears to be working virtually full time, both teaching in the labs and doing research into fast radio bursts with the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (the telescope I used to do my Physics Honours project back in the day). He’s the author “R. W. Hunstead” on this 2017 discovery paper.
New content today: