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When you think of entering a science project into a school science fair what do you think of? Quick! Let me guess… a volcano that creates a lava flow from a chemical reaction, right? Well maybe one day soon the “default” science fair project will be created with an Android Phone acting as an enabler of some sort. Take for example the following project by Neil Fraser.
Neil wanted to know if a Lava Lamp would work in a high gravity environment such as Jupiter. Instead of just guessing, he built a Lava Lamp Centrifuge and tested the results himself:
Of course we would like to make special note of Android’s use in this magnificient project:
The payload container pivots freely so that it is always facing ‘down’. In the middle is a 20 oz Motion Lamp from Google. Next to it is a Nexus One Android phone which runs G-Force to monitor the current gravity conditions (in the photo below the Android is not present since it was being used to take the photo). Recording both the lamp and the gravity monitor is a digital camera set to record a movie.
Kind of funny that Neil even bought the Lava Lamp from Google and it’s just fun to see how an Android Phone and an Android App were used to answer such a crazy scientific question.
Neil is currently a Google employee and WELL out of “grade school” – and obviously this project is well beyond the scope of a “science fair project” but it brings up an interesting idea. Any parents out there? Maybe you’ll think about “bonding” with your boy or girl by coming up with an Android-related science fair project, perhaps even by using G-Force in relation to one of their own interests.
If you’ve got any ideas please share them below. Not only will I be interested to hear them but Neil will be too:
So, now that I have this 3G centrifuge, does anyone have ideas for other things I could do with it? You’ve seen “Will it Blend?“, now it’s time for “Will it Spin?” A dipping bird is first on my list. My pet rat is not on the list.
Bring it on!
[Thanks Phases]
that is pretty cool, but circles don’t depict gravity accurately lol should have been a 3d free pivot not a 2d free pivot in order to “face down”
Isn’t Jupiter about 300 times earth’s gravity? I can’t really make out what the accelerometer says there, but it looks like 15 g’s…That’s a long ways off of Jupiter.
As a proof of concept, I suppose it at least suggests that the concept of a Lava Lamp will work on Jupiter, and why wouldn’t it? Liquids are largely uncompressable.
@QuantumRand: Jupiter’s gravity is only 2.36 greater than the gravity on your planet. While Jupiter itself has 317 times more mass than Earth, it isn’t very dense which means the radius is far larger.
With a 1.5 meter radius and a top speed of 42 RPM, the centrifuge goes up to 3 G. Roughly the same as the Space Shuttle during launch.