Abstract
In this chapter I describe the birth of a curious mechanical device called Vibrot, designed “on the side” while the main experiment I was attempting was giving frustrating results. It happened during a visit to a Spanish university thanks to the invitation of colleagues specialized in the dynamics of granular matter. Curiously enough, while the work started in that ocassion with top-quality equipment, we ended up doing research in the most classical “guerrilla-science” style!
By working on a somewhat wrong idea
you can often get a good idea.
But this takes time and you need
sympathetic and helpful colleagues.
Martin Perl.
in “One hundred reasons to be a scientist” (ICTP, 2004)
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- 1.
Notice that the work described in the previous chapter on laterally shaken granular matter was performed years after my visit to Navarra.
- 2.
An extension of the three-dimensional granular Maxwell demon would be studied by D. van del Meer and others at the University of Twente (Netherlands) within the next few years.
- 3.
“Would you please give me a chance to make a little test over there, please?”
- 4.
Notice that \(\Gamma = 1\) means that the maximum acceleration produced by the vibrating plate is equal to \(g\). So, if a ball, for example, is put on the vibrator and subjected to \(\Gamma > 1\), the object will detach from the surface during certain intervals within one cycle (we refer to this as “flying”).
- 5.
This is analogous to the smaller weight we feel in an elevator that increases its speed (i.e., accelerates) as it goes down… something exploited in the lab-in-a-bucket project presented in Chap. 4.
- 6.
Christian Scholz, a young German researcher who presented a very detailed computational simulation of the vibrot’s motion using the finite-element method in the same meeting, right after the Cuban students, started his talk with “Well, you know, we Germans solve problems with a hammer”. Of course, it was just a German joke about Germans: the “classic” Cuban approach and the “computational” German approach complemented each other perfectly.
- 7.
Metallic micro-rods a few microns long have been driven at speeds of approximately 200 microns/s along the axial direction, using ultrasound waves in the MHz range. The motion, caused by the asymmetry along the axis of the rod, does not involve rotation around its axis.
- 8.
Christian’s mass production of vibrots may well have saved numerous scientists from overweight due to possible over-exposure to soft-drink overdoses in the name of science.
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Altshuler, E. (2017). A Reason to Drink Coca Cola. In: Guerrilla Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51624-0_6
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