• Question: whats the best experiment you've ever done?

    Asked by Lexi to Dave, Ed, Guido, Hugh, Stef on 12 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by NATTA.
    • Photo: Dave Bond

      Dave Bond answered on 12 Mar 2015:

      Hi Lexi,

      I think there is no one thing. There is always the next best and cool thing round the corner.
      I am enjoyig designing the next high performance filesystem at Diamond. This will be able to store the equivenant of 10 DVD’s a second of data. This will keep Diamond going for the next three years.

      I say experiment as there is a lot of research and testing to get to that point. So it is a bit like an experiment.

    • Photo: Ed Rial

      Ed Rial answered on 13 Mar 2015:

      Hi Lexi

      The best experiment I’ve ever done was to use our particle accelerator at Diamond to see how much it heats up as we put more power in to it. Some of the magnets need to be really cold, so we want to keep the heat going into them as low as possible.

      I didn’t make any great discoveries, but I did get to control a machine the size of a football field 😀

    • Photo: Hugh Harvey

      Hugh Harvey answered on 13 Mar 2015:

      I measured the speed of light using a block of butter and a microwave at home!

      If you microwave the butter for about 10 – 20 seconds (without the spinning plate inside) then you get ripples in the butter. You can measure the distance between the ripples and calculate the speed of light!

      If your microwave is a standard model, it will have a frequency of 2.45 gigahertz. This means that the microwaves move up and down 2.45 billion times per second.

      Multiply the distance between the spots on the butter by two. Multiply that by 2,450,000,000 (2.45 gigahertz expressed as hertz) and you get the speed of light!

      Eureka!

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