Category: Physics

A USB-powered Homebrew X-ray machine. And who is Project 326?

This is an interesting project. The use of dental X-ray packs was really innovative. The approporately snarky presentation about nanny-state nervous nellies was great. It all reminded me the X-ray chapter of C.L. Stong’s great book “The Amateur Scientist.” Here is a .pdf of the book: http://www.ke5fx.com/stong.pdf
The X-Ray machine in Stong’s book appears on page 500 (520 in the .pdf) Here is the opening paragraphs:

Indeed, it was lonely up there in the 10^-8 cm band!


But who is behind Project 326? Who is the robot narrator’s human assistant? At first I thought they were joking when they said they were in Southern China. But YouTube does show them in Hong Kong. He has British accent, but oddly he calls valves “tubes.” He also seems to use quite a bit of SolderSmoke terminology and practice: He uses copper tape as a ground plane. He talks about relaeasing “Magic Smoke” and of passing or failing “the smoke test.” Could it be that Project 326 had been listening to the SolderSmoke podcast? We hope so! Please let us know if y ou have any background info on this mad amateur scientist.

Here is the Project 326 YouTube channel:

On the importance of taking a break.

Thomas K4SWL has a good post about the importance of taking a break from radio. Following up on this, I noted that “taking a break” is often a good way of finding a solution to a difficult problem. I noted that I have confirmed this — it has worked for me. Pete Juliano N6QW recently announced that he is taking a break from the MHST project. That is a good idea. A solution will likely emerge.

I noted that there is some evidence backing up our suspicion about the benefits of breaks. I earlier shared some comments from Harry Cliff’s excellent book, “How to make an Apple Pie from Scratch.”

https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2024/04/cloud-chamber-finale.html

Harry also wrote about the usefullness of taking breaks. In 1917 Ernest Rutherford was having trouble understanding the presence of some hydrogen nuclei. Harry writes:

“Again, he was forced to put his work on hiatus to go on a mission to the United States in the summer of 1917, but it turned out to be one of those useful breaks when stepping away from a problem lets your mind slowly work out the problem in the background. When Rutherford got back to the lab in September he had the answer…”

There are many other examples.

So, if you get stuck, take a break!

Using a Photomultiplier THERMATRON to Detect Single Photons

I’ve been a fan of Jeroen’s YouTube channel for a while now. He has a very nice approach, combining theoretical knowlege with practical experiments and equipment builds. Here we see him using a photomultiplier tube and a board acquired in flea market to build his photon detector.

This video has a lot to offer us. First, there is a single thermatron. There is a tube socket. There is a (really small!) high-voltage power supply. He uses an oscilloscope. There is a laser. There are photons. And at one point, a single photon.

Having recently built a simple Wilson Cloud Chamber, my attraction to this device is easy to explain. I suspect our friend Grayson will be interested in it for Thermatronic reasons. There is a Part II. Check out the YouTube channel:

Here is more info on the channel and it’s creator:

Hi, my name is Jeroen and on the Huygens Optics channel I publish videos on personal projects. My main fields of interest are optics, mechanics and photolithography. The videos aren’t targeted towards a general audience but for people with a passion for science and technology (e.g. my fellow nerds). The channel is named after the famous Dutch mathematician, astronomer and inventor Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695). He was the first to publish a mathematical description of the wave properties of light, and also discovered Saturn’s rings.
————

Thanks Jeroen

Using a Photomultiplier THERMATRON to Detect Single Photons

I’ve been a fan of Jeroen’s YouTube channel for a while now. He has a very nice approach, combining theoretical knowlege with practical experiments and equipment builds. Here we see him using a photomultiplier tube and a board acquired in flea market to build his photon detector.

This video has a lot to offer us. First, there is a single thermatron. There is a tube socket. There is a (really small!) high-voltage power supply. He uses an oscilloscope. There is a laser. There are photons. And at one point, a single photon.

Having recently built a simple Wilson Cloud Chamber, my attraction to this device is easy to explain. I suspect our friend Grayson will be interested in it for Thermatronic reasons. There is a Part II. Check out the YouTube channel:

Here is more info on the channel and it’s creator:

Hi, my name is Jeroen and on the Huygens Optics channel I publish videos on personal projects. My main fields of interest are optics, mechanics and photolithography. The videos aren’t targeted towards a general audience but for people with a passion for science and technology (e.g. my fellow nerds). The channel is named after the famous Dutch mathematician, astronomer and inventor Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695). He was the first to publish a mathematical description of the wave properties of light, and also discovered Saturn’s rings.
————

Thanks Jeroen

“Matter Waves” — A 1961 Bell Labs Film

I continue to mine the AT&T video archive. Here’s a really wonderful 1961 film showing how particles really are waves also. The simplicity of the gear that the Bell Labs folks used to demonstrate this is really admirable. I would love to see the preceding film (the one that shows how light waves are really also particles).

How Big is a Photon? (Video)

As I have mentioned in the podcast and in blog posts, I have a lot of trouble picturing HOW 20 meter photons somehow fly off my antenna. I understand how EM WAVES are generated. But there doesn’t seem to be any corresponding explanation for how the photons are generated.

This video looks at a related question: How BIG are the photons of visible light? I am not sure this is all correct (and neither, apparently, is the creator of this video) but it is very interesting.

Comments are welcome.

Electromagnetic Waves — Sir Lawrence Bragg — Royal Institution (Video)

This is a really wonderful video. I especially liked his presentation on the nature of the EM spectrum, and his use of the centimeter waves to demonstrate wave behaviour. The two slit experiment was very nice. Sir Lawrence’s presentation on SWR was brilliant.

Still, you wonder how would all this be done if those waves of Sir Lawrence (and Young, Maxwell and Faraday) were considered to be the photons that they also really are?

In any case, three cheers for the Royal Institution: https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/search?q=Royal+Institution

Cloud Chamber Finale

Today’s aparatus (above). Chamber is larger and I left the bottom sealed. It sits directly atop a chunk of dry ice. The spongeat the top is soaked in alcohol.

This is a one minute clip. It does seem a bit like watching paint dry, but you will see many atomic particles moving through the cloud. If you look to the right side of the screen you will see that the cloud has started to rain alcohol. I will put additional clips on the Patreon site.
Harry Cliff’s wonderful book mentions the origins of the cloud chamber.

Click for a better view.
Click for a better view/
Here’s an interesing site on cloud chambers:

https://www.hep.phy.cam.ac.uk/scatter/cloud.html#:~:text=Operate%20the%20chamber%20in%20a,approximately%20parallel%20and%20horizontal%20beam.
And here’s another one:

https://scoollab.web.cern.ch/cloud-chamber#:~:text=The%20cloud%20chamber%20was%20one,dry%20ice%2C%20and%20Isopropyl%20alcohol.

I think that is all I will do on the cloud chambers. This was a lot of fun, but I am running out of dry ice. There is, however, a lot of room for improvement and experimentation here, and a project likes this puts you in touch with the earliest days of particle physics (as Harry Cliff explains above). Good luck on 1.22 nanometers! Please let us know how you do.

Here is one more look at the “output” of my cloud chamber. This is a ten minute video. You can see many traces in this. Check it out:

More Cloud Chamber traces. April 26, 2024 (youtube.com)

Thank you Charles Wilson. And thank you C.L. Stong.

Big Success with Cloud Chamber

My Cloud Chamber
It was time to take a break from building SSB transceivers. I wanted to build something completely different. I went with something that I’ve wanted to build since I was a kid. Sometime in the late 1960s, I read about a Wilson Cloud Chamber in the book “The Amateur Scientist” by C.L. Stong (my mom got the book for me, at great sacrifice).

You have to make a little cloud in a chamber. When an atomic particle flies through (as they do!) it will leave a little trace in the cloud. Cool. Literally cool: This is a dry ice diffusion cloud chamber. You make the cloud by putting isopropyl alcohol in blotter paper at the top of the chamber. You then cool the bottom part (a lot) using dry ice. The alcohol evaporates, then is cooled into a cloud by the low temperature of the dry ice. Fortunately, my local supermarket has started selling dry ice (it was harder to come by when I was a kid). For the chamber, I used a plastic container from the same superpmarket. For the light source I used a little LED workshop flasllight.

I saw traces immediately, while I was setting the thing up.

Here are two videos of what I saw during that first hour:

This one minute video shows the traces I saw. Look for the little whisps of “smoke”:

This one shows a few more traces, but then BOOM at about 27 seconds. Check it out. What is that? (Thinking about it some more, I think this may have just been some higher humidity air leaking into the chamber and condensing suddenly.)


Here’s the C.L Stong book. My project begins on page 307

http://www.ke5fx.com/stong.pdf

So what band would this be? Something in the nanometer range, right?

Here is a video showing what you see in a large cloud chamber:

https://www.exploratorium.edu/video/cloud-chamber


Wilson Cloud Chambers – I Want to Build One

Wow, I’ve been wanting to build a Wilson Cloud Chamber for a long time, ever since I read about one back in the 1970s in C.L. Stong’s famous book “The Amateur Scientist.” Now this fellow Jim Messier comes along with this amazing video that features a cloud chamber that he built for a few bucks at age 13. I am feeling the pressure. No pun intended.

Back in the day, a reasonable excuse for not building this device was that it was hard to find the dry ice you needed for the cooling. No more! Now, at least in this area, you can get dry ice at your local supermarket (bring thick gloves or else you can burn your hands on this stuff). The heat is on. Well, actually the cold is on.

I wrote about cloud chambers before on this blog:

You can get the entire C.L. Stong book for free courtesy of KE5FX here:

All of this was sparked by a visit to Jim Messier’s amazing YouTube channel, “Our Own Devices.” There is a lot of great material there. Check it out and subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@CanadianMacGyver
Thanks Jim!

RIP Arno Penzias — Co-discoverer of the Big Bang Cosmic Background Radiaton

Penzias on the right
Here it the Penzias Obituary:
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/24/1226572843/arno-penzias-obituary-big-bang-theory

I think this is one of the best troubleshooting events in radio history: they thought at one point that what they were hearing was the result of pigeon poop in the antenna. Turns out they were hearing radiation from the birth of the universe.

And here is a wonderful 2014 6 minute podcast with Penzias and his co-discoverer Robert Wilson:
https://www.npr.org/2014/05/20/314239930/big-bangs-afterglow-two-scientists-recall-their-big-discovery

Four Old BBC Shows on Radio: Hams, Physics, and Antique Wireless

The first one, about ham operators in general, is pretty depressing. Then it goes downhill as they shift to those who are listening to baby monitors and cell phones. Yuck.

The second one seems to show some physicist having understandable difficulty explaining particle-wave duality in a short TV segment.

There is a short bit (that I didn’t quite get) about the BBC’s “Teddy Bear’s Picnic.”

The final one is about Gerald Wells and his Antique Wireless Museum in South London. Note the white coat — clearly a boffin. For a while I confused him with Rupert Goodwins G6HVY (similar white coat, but a different bloke).

A Very Cool Video with NanoVNA, FFT, LC circuits, W2AEW, CuriousMarc, Back-to-Back 1N4148s, and String-Powered Gyroscopes

Don’t let the scary nuclear chemistry title put you off — there is a LOT of very familiar homebrew stuff in this video. You will feel right at home. Many of the resonances take place in the ham bands. The CBLA may have to get involved here.

Thanks to Chuck WB9KZY for sending this.

And check out Ben’s video on is best projects from the last 10 years:

Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?

Andreas DL1AJG (who in real life is a professional biologist) sends us this excellent article about how biologists approach problems in living cells as opposed to how engineers or technicians approach problems in broken radios.

This excerpt from the 2002 article gives you an idea of the tone and content of the article:

“… I started to contemplate how biologists would determine why my radio does not work and how they would attempt to repair it. Because a majority of biologists pay little attention to physics, I had to assume that all we would know about the radio is that it is a box that is supposed to play music. How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size (Figure 2). We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we would investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio’s performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some can discern some distortion) this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate…”


Andreas points to diagrams in the article (see below). The first (A) shows how the biologist might view the radio. The schematic (B) shows how engineers or technicians view it:

As I read the article, I was reminded of the wise advice frequently dispensed through the SolderSmoke podcast: Do not look at a schematic as one single circuit. Instead try to see it as a number of subcircuits. Build and test these subcircuits separately. Join them together only after each subcircuit is found to be working.

Here is the link to the 2002 article in Cell by Yuri Lazebnik: https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S1535-6108(02)00133-2

This is all really interesting. I will share this with my son who is involved now in biological research.

In addition to his day job as a biologist, Andreas is a homebrewer of radios. Here is a pictures he sent to us back in 2019 of a regen receiver that he built:
Andreas asks if he might need an old Boatanchor radio to work on to improve his electronics/physics skills. I’d suggest staying away from the older tube stuff. Stick with the BITXs — homebrew one, stage by stage. And indeed, use the engineering approach to the electronics!

A Truly Great Book: “From Atoms to Amperes” by F.A. Wilson (Free Download)

This is a really wonderful book. I’m glad worldradiohistory.com has found a way to make it available as a free download. This is the kind of book that you want to download and keep available for future study. The day will come, for example, when you will want to understand how Einstein’s special relativity explains how that transformer in your rig actually works. F.A. Wilson explains that, and much more. Here is the link:

Thanks to Joefish for the heads-up.

Watch Mr. Wizard! 1952 Program on Electromagnetism. And more! (video)

Wow. This is a very thought provoking program. It is kind of like “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood,” but with science. The lessons provided by Mr. Wizard are really good, but one shudders to think about doing the these experiments with kids (or even with adults!) in today’s world. Here are a few of things that would cause trouble today:

— Liquid mercury.
— A big power supply. (“Here Willy, you hold the positive terminal.”)
— Even the sprinkling of iron filings would probably require masks at a minimum.
— In the end, letting poor Willy drop to the floor when Betsy turns off the electromagnet that was holding his swing in the air.
— And of course, poor old Mr. Wizard’s affinity for the kids would stir suspicions.

We also see a sad and very early example of the influence of advertisers and what they call today “product placement.” Note the fairly obvious plug (via Morse Code!) for breakfast cereal. In the credits you will see that the program was sponsored by “The Cereal Institute.” What next kids? Cigarettes?

But there is a lot of virtue in this program: The development of the telegraph key, Morse Code, CW sidetone. Unlike many of the Box Top Extras of today, young Betsy was not afraid to wind a coil.

We should all embrace the spirit of Mr. Wizard. We are, after all, the International Brotherhood of Electronic WIZARDS! These experiments reminded me a lot of the Trivial Electric Motor that my son Billy and I made when he was around Willy’s age (thanks for the idea Alan Yates).

Thanks to Chuck KF8TI for alerting us to this show. Chuck says this program was an early influence on him, and was one of the things that provided a connection between the theory he was learning in college and the real world of electronic devices.

Many more great programs like this can be found on Mr. Wizard’s YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/MrWizardStudios Please let us know if you find other videos (on this channel or elsewhere) that will be of special interest to the IBEW.
Finally, color TV in 1952? That seems a bit early for color. What do you folks think was happening here?

Bluetooth, Winston Churchill, The Speed of Light, and a 1938 Zenith Receiver

Hello Bill –


It has taken me a while to put hands on keyboard to send you this message, but having seen or heard a few more of your references to Jean Shepherd, I felt I must. Being a fan of vintage radio equipment and the American scene of the late 1930s, sometime back I acquired a very nice circa 1938 Zenith 5-S-119 AM/Shortwave radio.


Though it had been recently re-capped, it took some effort to get the thing working (needed a new power transformer), and still needs to be aligned, but it made a nice addition to my 1930s NYC Art Deco-inspired office. One reason I bought it was to add a Bluetooth receiver to it so I could listen to podcasts, etc, from my phone. I like the big electromagnetic speaker that those radios have and thought it would be cool to bring this one back to life. I picked up a small Bluetooth receiver board and a power supply for a few dollars online and got it working in the Zenith with no difficulty, except for some AC hum and oscillator noise that I will work on when I have time. So, success!

But here is the Jean Shepherd part. I recall one of his broadcasts in which he offered his theory that every radio transmission ever made is still out there, traveling further and further into intergalactic space and getting weaker and weaker, but still there. What an idea that was. I would say he is right. I have pondered the idea ever since. So being also a Winston Churchill fan, what would be the first recording I would play through the Bluetooth? What else but his 1940 blood, toil, tears, and sweat speech! So there was the scene — the Churchill speech playing the same audio waveform through a radio that might very well have played it live (or close to live) back in 1940! Almost (though not quite) like detecting the original still-traveling radio signal out there past the star Phi2 Ceti or wherever it is now!

Well that was a quick adventure this past summer that I thought you might appreciate.

Keep the Solder Smoke podcasts coming!

Tom Fuhrman, WX2J

“Adventures in Electromagnetism” Video by Julius Sumner Miller

This guy is quite a character, with a real knack for describing physics. At the start of this video he says that these kinds of adventures are “good for the spirit and the soul.” Right you are Professor Miller. I am currently recovering from a minor back injury. It is nothing serious, but it has delayed the production of the SolderSmoke Podcast #230. These videos are, for me, just what the doctor should have ordered.

I liked Miller’s references to Michael Faraday.

There are many videos on the Julius Sumner Miller YouTube Channel. They are indeed “good for the spirit and the soul.” Thanks to Hack-A-Day for alerting us to this treasure trove.