• Question: What is the best practical you have ever done?

    Asked by anon-355170 on 10 Mar 2023. This question was also asked by anon-361260.
    • Photo: Lucien Heurtier

      Lucien Heurtier answered on 10 Mar 2023:

      Well, when I was a school student, I really didn’t like physics, so during practicals, I was usually bored because most of them were quite boring 😀 However, once I remember we used crystals to decompose white light into a rainbow, and then separated the different colours with other crystals, and then we obtained a lot of light beams with pure colours, that we could play with to make nice pictures on a screen, that was a lot of fun!

    • Photo: Barak Gilboa

      Barak Gilboa answered on 13 Mar 2023:

      My favourite practical involved creating solitons, which are a very special kind of waves, in a very simple experiment where you displaced water in a narrow canal followed by releasing it and watch the wave move. The amazing part comes from the properties of solitons where two such waves travelling against each other will just pass through without interacting! It is so unintuitive that it looks like magic. Another favourite is letting a magnet float in the air over a superconductor. You can find examples of both online.

    • Photo: Emma Harris

      Emma Harris answered on 13 Mar 2023:

      I don’t do practicals in my job, but my favourite practical in school was exploding jelly babies in a bunsen burner to measure the calories and energy in them!

    • Photo: Adam Steinberg

      Adam Steinberg answered on 13 Mar 2023:

      When I was studying Physics at university, we did a practical where we got to build a laser, using just a couple of mirrors, a tube of gas, and some electricity – but the best bit was when we got to play around with the laser we’d built, changing the wavelength or the beam shape by putting things between the mirrors. It was a great practical because we got to make something that we had known about for years, using Physics that we’d just been learning about.

    • Photo: Fehn Chua-Short

      Fehn Chua-Short answered on 14 Mar 2023: last edited 15 Mar 2023 10:55 am

      One of my favourite practicals was in a Materials Science module at university. We made a ‘non-Newtonian fluid’ just by mixing cornflour and water in a bowl. The ‘viscosity’ – i.e. how runny or thick it was – changed depending on how much force you used. If you tipped the bowl gently, the cornflour mixture flowed like a liquid – but if you hit the surface with your hand, it felt solid and your hand bounced off!

      There are videos online – and it might even be a practical you could do in class!

    • Photo: Stuart Clare

      Stuart Clare answered on 17 Mar 2023:

      I have done some great science experiments, but I will tell you about a fun thing that a colleague and I did.

      If you have had an MRI scan, you might know that MRI scanners are noisy. This is because we have to put 100s of amps of current through a wire that is sitting in a magnet that is strong enough to pick up a but. An MRI scanner is like a massive loudspeaker. We try and make it quite, but it is hard.

      We wondered whether we could actually make the MRI scanner play a tune, rather than just make a noise, so we programmed it up so that, it played a tuned (twinkle, twinkle little star!). It was just silly, but it was a good way to learn more about how to programme the MRI scanner

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