SCIENCE SEMINAR
The Physics of Breaking Beer Bottles:
A Tribute to Dr. Walter Stephan
Dr. Lorne Nelson
Bishop’s University
Friday, November 23, 2012
1:30 pm
Nicolls 1
Even though Professor Walter Stephan was a theoretical physicist, he enjoyed teaching lab courses. It was a sad day and a great loss to Bishop's when he succumbed to lymphocytic leukemia in January 2011. But he left an important legacy to the Physics Department thanks to a generous gift that has allowed us to purchase sophisticated laboratory equipment. Since most of this equipment will reside in Johnson 10, we will honour his memory by renaming that lab as the Walter Stephan Memorial Laboratory.
In this talk, I will demonstrate our new high-speed camera that Dr. Stephan was actually first to suggest that we purchase in order to study non-linear dynamics (chaos theory). The camera has many experimental applications and I will discuss how it can be used to study short time-scale phenomena. Specifically, I will repeat a clever party trick that illustrates how to break a beer bottle without hitting it with any foreign object. The science question that arises concerns the physical mechanism by which the bottle breaks. I will present several hypotheses to explain the fracturing process and then use the high-speed camera to show how we can investigate these possibilities and ultimately determine which ones can be invalidated.
Immediately after the talk we will go to Johnson 10 to inaugurate the Walter Stephan Memorial Laboratory. Food and refreshments will be served.
Everyone is welcome.
