Science and Technology Quiz 4

Does it create sparks as the arm at the top spins round?

Is it the experiment where amino acids were formed from simple gases like ammonia,carbon dioxide, water vapour when they tried to model the early earths atmosphere?
 
Looks like an electron tube (circuit filament in a vacuum tube) to me, but I think it could be one of those Miller type experiments as mentioned.

That's totally got to be Enrico Fermi!!!!!!!!!
 
Does it create sparks as the arm at the top spins round?

No, nothing spinning there. There is high voltage involved, but that's not the point of the device.

Is it the experiment where amino acids were formed from simple gases like ammonia,carbon dioxide, water vapour when they tried to model the early earths atmosphere?

Nice guess, but no, it's nothing chemical.


Looks like an electron tube (circuit filament in a vacuum tube) to me, but I think it could be one of those Miller type experiments as mentioned.

That's also a nice guess for the function of the coil structure, but it's something else.

That's totally got to be Enrico Fermi!!!!!!!!!

Although they do look somewhat similar, this scientist did not quite reach the fame of Enrico Fermi. His fame is pretty much entirely tied to the invention of that device, so almost anybody recognizing his face would be quite familiar with the device.
 
I'm gonna guess it's something high voltage, low atmosphere (vacuum), and the tip is some sort of sample (looks like mercury to me, not sure). I'm gonna guess it's to vaporize a liquid sample by voltage. I'm gonna hazard that that is for inserting the vaporized sample into a Mass Spectrophotomer. Useful for ionizing a biological macromolecule.

Or I guess it's actually an "ion trap" for MS.
 
I'm gonna guess it's something high voltage, low atmosphere (vacuum), and the tip is some sort of sample (looks like mercury to me, not sure). I'm gonna guess it's to vaporize a liquid sample by voltage. I'm gonna hazard that that is for inserting the vaporized sample into a Mass Spectrophotomer. Useful for ionizing a biological macromolecule.

Or I guess it's actually an "ion trap" for MS.

No, nothing in that direction.

What you call mercury are just the soldered contacts, I think. Get away from the high voltage, today you can buy consumer-grade variants of this device type that run on common batteries. Of course, they look vastly different.
 
some kind of electricity meter?
 
That tube in a microwave?
 
Laser.

Dunno who it is though.

Open floor if I'm right.

And we have a winner.

The device on that picture is the first working laser. The coil structure is a flashlamp for pumping and the rod in the middle is a ruby crystal as laser medium.

The scientist is Theodore Maiman who managed to build that first laser.

A fun story: When Maiman wanted to publish results, his paper was rejected by PRL (It was published a few months later in Nature). I guess at that time nobody could have imagined what wide range of applications this strange device would have.
 
OPEN FLOOR

...so I'll pose a quickie:

What are the 4 fundamental circuit elements?

[I'm taking this from a science news blog, so if the answer turns out to be completely wrong I apologize in advance!]
 
Transistor, capacitor, resistor, and invertor? :)
 
Same as above but with a cell/battery/power source instead of invertor
 
Battery(Voltage source), resistor, capacitor, inductor.

They're the fundamentals because ANY circuit/object can be represented by a combination of the above. Including complicated things like op-amps.

Lol, typing that out has just made me realise that I no longer remember a THING about inductors.... If they came up in a circuit it'd do magic as far as I was concerned :p
 
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