Re: curvature of buckets of water

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Sun, 4 Jul 1999, Herbert H Gottlieb wrote:

> Hi Bob.....
>
> And another good one is to place a tub of hot melted paraffin on a
> rotating
> turntable. When it cools and solidifies its parabolic surface can be
> used to make good mirrors for physics demos or telescopes.

There's one amateur astronomer who swears by epoxy mirrors cast on a
turntable.  The Exploratorium museum in SF used to have a rotating mercury
mirror with a big speed-control knob.  Must have been 30 gallons or more!

On the weird-sci front, one experimenter reported that seedlings tilt
inwards if they are grown on a pan over a rotating flywheel (the pan stays
still!)  They neglected to account for the outwards-flowing breeze stirred
up by the flywheel.


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William J. Beaty                                  SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
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