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NHSEE 2010 Information
Rules & Registration OverviewLife and Science: my life as a wave
The stream of events and learning
in one's own life has mysterious twists and turns. As we go through
school, we often don't know what activities we'll be engaged at various
stages of our life to come and, therefore, what we'll need to know during
those stages. At least, that was certainly the case for me.
In grade school, I took up music
as a trombonist. I loved it and practiced for 1-2 hours after school.
I lived in a neighborhood where there was only one other child, so I
had to find activities, in addition to music, which were entertaining
to me. I liked to invent things. My parents encouraged this tendency.
With a chemistry set given to me for Christmas, I made sulfuric acid,
gun powder, and even tried making a rocket powered by that gun powder.
I made a static rocket stand in which
to try out my rocket engine. I used a magnesium strip to act as a fuse
and a train transformer with heavy gage wire that would get hot as the
transformer was gradually turned up. The hot wire would then light the
magnesium. I positioned the exhaust of the engine to point into the
air to avoid any possible fire events. Things didn't go quite like I
planned. Instead of a steady burn that a rocket engine should have,
my rocket fuel burned rapidly more like a bomb. It blew a hole in the
roof of our back porch. My mother, who was used to my experiments, sat
unmoved, attending to her knitting without missing a stitch.
When I arrived in seventh grade,
my interests led me to take a science class. Mr. Bell was an engaging
teacher and had my attention. He had a standing invitation for all students
to stay after school and do science related activities that were of
interest to us. I stayed after school. I don't remember all the things
I explored as the year progressed, but Mr. Bell said there was a Science
Fair coming up where we could show a project. I decided to try to build
a project for the event.
In class, we studied the properties
of light, and that was of some interest to me. Our project had to be
self-designed and self-made. Capturing the properties of light was too
hard for me, but Mr. Bell suggested that I study the properties of sound
waves. This made sense to me, because I at least had a feel for sound
because of my musical interests.
I decided to show how sound waves
propagate, bending around objects and spreading through-out its medium
of transmission (air). My problem was how to demonstrate those properties.
Mr. Bell suggested that I needed something to make the waves visible.
So here is how I did it (see Figure
1): Make a stand that would hold a glass window parallel to the floor.
Underneath the window, place a bright light and above the window, stretch
thin paper (Mr. Bell suggest velum used by architects) in order to see
the shadows the waves will make. How do those shadows happen? In the
thin layer, on the top of the glass, put a quarter inch of water. In
the water, place various objects to block waves made in the water in
order to show how waves behave. [ I later found out that this kind of
contraption is known as a "Ripple Tank." ]
Ok, how to make those waves? I took
my electric train apart and turned it upside down. I used the train
transformer (again) to control the speed of the train which, in turn,
would control how fast the waves would be made (frequency). Now, how
to make the train wheels make waves in the water? I chose to use a ping-pong
ball and parts from an erector set. The erector set parts would transmit
the up-down motion of the train wheel to an up-down motion of the ping-pong
ball which would be floating in the water (see Figure 2). The up-down
motion of the ping-pong ball would cause "wave hills and valleys"
in a cyclical pattern (sine pattern, in this case, since the rotation
of the wheel rotates 360 degrees repeatedly).
I then placed a camera (a tiny box
camera called a "Brownie") above the velum to take still pictures
of the wave shadows. In those days, cameras used film and were not as
readily available or as good as they are today. I used the photographs
to show how waves move around various objects and barriers placed in
the water.
This project won the State Science
Fair and First Place at the Regional Science Fair. The Regional Science
Fair was held at the Bureau of Standards in Boulder, CO. The judges
were scientists at the Bureau. After the award ceremony, several Bureau
scientists appeared, closely examining the project. I was totally surprised
by winning. The kid next to me had this astounding project that made
tornados which really impressed me. I asked why he didn't win, one of
the scientists said, "His dad built it." Instead, they were
fascinated with the train-ping-pong combination and said it showed that
I had really done the thinking and the work myself.
Subsequently, I continued my musical
interests getting a B.A. and M.A. and, due to a quirk of fate, I got
a Fellowship to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to work on a Doctorate.
During these last two degrees, electronic music was developing and I
became involved in that field. My study of sound was now very relevant
to electronic music where controlling frequency, amplitude, and using
modulation to create wave shape are of central concern. This led to
some study at MIT where I met interesting people like Marvin Minsky
(who, some say, is “the father of Artifical Intellegence”).
By now, I saw that the whole of the
sound world was vibratory phenomenon and that, in turn, was connected
to my personal world by the change of air vibration into neural-bio
equivalents in the ear, then into electro-bio-emotional objects that
express cultural values (note how music expresses generational interests,
for example). My science experience helped me to think in logical
ways that I applied in learning music theory. Both fields of study led
me to learn object-oriented programming, my current interest.
I see the spiritual dimension, in
fact, the whole universe as various manifestations of vibration, vibration
as infinitely recursive systems revealing themselves in economics, biology,
climate science, finance, education, electronic engineering ( Nyquist,
Bode), mechanical engineering (Watt, Maxwell), thermodynamics. I believe
all fields of study are vibratory because of how information feedback
and recursion processes are recast in each field. These processes are
often obscured by the lack of proper detection tools and our tendency
to resist change by keeping to the paradigms of the past.
I certainly didn't see how studying
simple vibration would lead to so many interesting things, but to paraphrase
a Buddhist saying, "Sit in your backyard. Observe with care and
learn about the whole world."
I could have never anticipated this
sequence of events in my life, but it happened because of my seventh
grade science teacher encouraged me to explore things, make things,
complete things, and learn from those things using science as a method
of observation and verification.
Thank you, Mr. Bell, wherever
you are.
RIPPLE STAND
figure 1.
PING-PONG WAVE MAKER
figure 2.
