John’s Side Project: Fire!
Saturday, March 20th, 2010For the last few weeks, John and his friend Roy have been working in their spare time on a neat physics demonstration to show off at the Texas A&M Physics Festival this coming weekend.
If you know what a standing wave is, you’ve probably seen the classic demonstration with a vibrating string. But did you know you can also trace out a standing wave in FIRE? True story.
The apparatus is called a Rubens Tube, after its kind-of inventor. It’s a long metal tube with small holes drilled along its length, filled with a flammable gas and set alight. When you pipe music into one end of the tube, the flames jump into different wave patterns.
Last night I got to stop by campus and videotape their progress. With a little pretending and a little video editing, we almost made it look like they built this contraption in a single evening.
Pretty neat, eh?
