Norwich Science Festival 2023
It is hard to credit that we are now more than four months away from the Norwich Science Festival, but so we are, and starting to think about next year’s edition. No Kitchen Chemistry this year, instead I was there with “The Sound of Science” show. In that show I talk about the physics behind musical instruments, and get to play a few along the way. Most of them are homemade, but one or two are commercially produced. If you would like to see the sort of thing I do in the other bit of my spare time, perhaps at trip to the “Sound of Science” show would be worthwhile.
In addition I had a few helpers who ran some “hands on” demonstrations for the public. The vacuum bazooka is always a big hit, and some of the marshmallows that we used as projectiles are still stuck at the top of the Forum. In addition we had the Van der Graaf generator with us to make sparks, and do some experiments driven with static electricity. Of course, it doesn’t tend to work well when people are watching – so here is a video I made “before the show”.
The table tennis ball is covered with conductive paint. The van der Graff generator charges up alternate strips of the aluminium foil so the ball is repeatedly repelled and then grounded on the other strips. This drives the ball and is similar to the process used in particle accelerators (although not a precise analogy).