A Series of Tubes

Recently I went to the Griffith Observatory.  First off, the Griffith observatory is named after Griffith J Griffith.  No I did not write that wrong, the guy’s first and last name is the same frign name (hilarious).  I of course found this out in a video narrated by spock Loenard Nimoy.  The Wikipedia page on Griffith J Griffith is quite entertaining (attempted murder, failed and successful lies about military accomplishment).  After the city of Los Angeles accepted the controversial money from Griffith J Griffith, seriously read that Wikipedia article, they constructed the observatory as a public institution.  This is the observatory in Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean.

There were a few things that perplexed me and where I did not understand the explanation.  First off is the pendulum in the entry way.  The deal with the pendulum is simple: As the earth rotates, the direction that the pendulum swings will change.  This sounds easy enough, and is simple to understand if you are sitting on the north pole.  In LA, the whole supporting structure of the pendulum is going around with the earth, messing up the simple explanation.  The pendulum will cycle back to a north/south swing every 32 hours or so (not 24 or 48).  It took quite a while pouring over the Wikipedia page on Coriolis force just to figure it out, and I don’t think I can do a better job at it than Wikipedia did.

We saw the show in the planetarium, which talked about the planets and the solar system and the possibility of life outside of Earth.  The show was pretty cool, but a lot of the info can be found in the awe inspiring cosmos series, which I’m about 75% done watching on hulu.

2 other cool things I saw there are the cosmic ray detectors.  One is a cloud chamber and the other is a spark chamber detector.  I really liked the fact that you can make each of them at home.  The cloud chamber will allow you to see cosmic rays as they fall.  The spark chamber is only tuned to Muons, instead of the cloud chamber which shows a lot more cosmic rays.  The cloud chamber is probably the easier to make since you don’t need a high voltage source.  The Spark chamber is a little more up my alley since you are dealing with dangerously high voltages, and you can see these sudden flashes of light.  Learn to make a spark chamber or a cloud chamber by following the links.

A cloud chamber is shown in this lecture at around 28 minutes.