Monthly Archives: May 2008

Richard Feynman at the Thinking Machines Corporation

The Long Now Foundation re-published an essay Daniel Hillis wrote for Physics Today: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine.

And speaking of Feynman: One of my favourite quotes about teaching can be found in the foreword to his Lectures on Physics:

“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” Edward Gibbon.

Mentos Geysers

I guess that by now everybody knows that you can build a very sticky geyser by dropping Mentos into a bottle of Coke. Some of my students and I even had a lot of fun – um, I meant we did some very serious scientific experiments with carbonated beverages and mints with a porous surface in a science class just before the summer break last year. However, our experiments were quite tame compared to these…

Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz have taken the experiment to the next level – “with over 250 geysers of soda. And this time they’re linked together in one giant chain reaction! A clever mechanism harnesses the power of one geyser of Diet Coke to drop the Mentos into the next bottle. So just like dominos, all they have to do is start the first one, and the rest is Diet Coke & Mentos history!” Watch it here.

(Siehe auch hier im Archiv.)