"Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Richard Feynman was that rare combination of genius and accessibility to the non-physicist. If there was one thing he was confident in it was sitting down with a seemingly impossible puzzle until he solved it. He also played the bongos, told funny stories, and pulled a great poker face on the (in)appropriate occasion.

If you read any of his stories from the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", I recommend Safecracker Meets Safecracker. It's a great example of how Feynman rolls, and I cracked a grin (bad pun?) while reading it.

Feynman developed an active observance of social irresponsibility from the great mathematician John Von Neumann, who gave him this advice:

You don't have to be responsible for the world you're in.

Perhaps due to this lack of seriousness, Feynman romps through some entertaining twists and turns in life.

Read The Dignified Professor to find out how the whole business that got him the Nobel Prize "came from piddling with a wobbling plate". Burned out from working on the atomic bomb project during WWII, he felt an unusual twinge of disgust for physics in his new life as a young college professor. He asked himself why he had once enjoyed doing physics and realized it was because he used to do whatever he felt like doing - i.e. play with it.

An example of Feynman's idea of play: figuring out how to determine the curve for water running out of a faucet.

So when he was at the cafeteria he saw a guy throw a plate in the air and noticed the plate wobbled. For fun he set out to determine the motion of the plate wobbles. "It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it!"

Maybe a little more effortless for him than for the average person, but he set out to actively play just like anyone might. In science I see this sense of play slip through fingers like sand (I include my own undergraduate experiences here). It gets replaced with talk of "the future of science and the betterment of society", or maybe just getting a good grade.

At any rate Feynman's stories are a good read and he packs a joy for physics into them. 

Why promote science fairs

This week the LA Convention Center was filled with poster boards and precocious students for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. The biggest science fair in the world attracts more than 1,500 participants from 65 countries. This year’s $75,000 grand prize went to Matthew Fedderson and Blake Marggraff of Lafayette, California for their research on treating simulated cancer cells with Compton-scattered secondary radiation. Nothing less than professional-level science projects (albeit with the help of a scientist mentor in most cases) can be expected from ISEF.

I participated in the fair for a day as a volunteer interpreter and was able to meet some of the Japanese students. They qualified by winning national-level high school science fairs in Japan – impressive students on paper and in person.

In science fairs the first hurdle is to come up with a good question. You can’t just ask a big question like, “How can I cure cancer?” The best questions come from a simple observation in your surroundings. The next hurdle is to design a clean, simple experiment to test your hypothesis.

I helped out with a student who experimented with liquid nitrogen. While playing with liquid nitrogen he noticed that some materials boil within the nitrogen, calm down, and then re-boil. He asked, “Why does re-boiling occur?” He observed a simple mechanism and being curious, wondered how it works. After testing re-boiling for many materials he found that re-boiling occurred the most for materials with high thermal conductivity.

With the help of a high-speed camera he also discovered that a film of bubbles collects on the material before it re-boils. He then tested whether the film of bubbles causes re-boiling by breaking the film with a heating wire. That’s the part of the experiment that I really like – he found a way to disrupt the film of bubbles and observe what happens in its absence. It’s a well-designed experiment. He found that when he applied more current to the heating wire, the material finished reboiling faster. The conclusion: cooling can be accelerated if the film of bubbles is broken by non-uniform heating.

The schedule for the students is pretty grueling. They are at the convention center from 7am to 6pm, where they present their experiment to judges in English, a second language for them. One of the people from the Japanese team remarked that these students can present their science projects better in English than they can do small talk in English. Ask them how surface area affects reboiling in liquid nitrogen and they’ll answer straight away. But as a judge if you try to break the ice with, “Have you visited Disneyland yet?” they get a little thrown off.

I was very happy to meet these students. They were mature and at the top of their game. One of them gave me a Japanese fan, too! There was a clip from NPR that pointed out that kids (especially those at this science fair) can contribute to science and offer something different. Where an older, trained scientist may think that something will never work, a kid might look at something in a new way. She might ask, “Why not?”

UCR Science Lecture Series

Yesterday I went to a talk held at UCR as part of a science lecture series open to the public. Cheryl Hayashi, a biology professor at UCR, gave a talk on biomimetic technologies – innovations that imitate nature. Hayashi advocates that there is a lot to learn from nature. Shaped by natural selection over a super-human stretch of time, designs found in nature are often superior to manmade technologies.

Hayashi’s slight frame packs a bundle of energy and enthusiasm for her work. She wears comfortable shoes and slacks and sports hair slightly more fashionable than the average professor. “Do you see this here?” she asks as she walks from one side of the room to the other, making sure that everyone in the audience can see what she is pointing out. It is a picture of sand. “There are two eyes here,” she draws her hand over the picture, “and here are the legs coming out.” The audience “oooohs” in comprehension – now we see a spider camouflaging itself in the sand. Hayashi shoots a mischievous look at us and exclaims, “You guys will believe anything, huh!” She’s just kidding, though. She assures us there really is a spider there.

Hayashi's fascination with nature is infectious as she takes us through current technologies that imitate nature. She offers the example of a butterfly that does not use pigment to color its brilliant metallic blue wings. Instead the wings are made of tiny lens-like scales that nature has optically engineered to reflect blue wavelengths of light back to us. Sonar, often used by the military, has been used for much longer by bats and dolphins to detect their surroundings. Speedo recently developed swimsuits that mimic shark skin to create more efficiency for swimmers. And the inspiration for Velcro came to an inventor when he came back from a hike to find himself and his dog covered in fast-sticking seed burrs.

Hayashi herself works with spiders and researches spider silk. She urges us to imagine what it would be like to be a small spider interacting in a giant’s world. They need their silk to interact with their surroundings. Incredibly, spiders create 7 different kinds of silk. Hayashi’s lab measures the properties of the silk and researches how spiders produce it. Spider silk can stretch to twice its length without breaking and has superior strength, extensibility, and toughness compared to manmade materials. While a string of spider silk 1mm in diameter could lift a cat (11 pounds), a 20mm diameter string could lift a hippo (4400 pounds). That’s a tough string of silk.

Some promising applications for spider silk include tough, lightweight gear such as bullet-proof vests and medical products such as bandages and sutures. Spider silk also exhibits muscle-like properties: wetness and humidity cause the silk to contract. It could provide an alternative to artificial muscle tissue, which contracts through electrical impulses. Producing spider silk in mass quantities for commercial applications presents another challenge and opens a new topic of research.

After this talk I am left impressed by designs that occur in nature. I am also curious – what does Hayashi do with spiders she finds in her house? She wouldn’t squash them, would she? Perhaps she takes them with her to lab.

For more info on the Science Lecture Series, visit here!