Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The Physics of Scotch Tape

Anyone who has been reading this blog for any considerable period of time would know that I love, LOVE reading on or studying small, "mundane" things. This is what got me interested in physics in the first place. So I read with glee and fascination at this Symmetry Breaking article on scotch tape.

I'm sure many of you have heard of the original discovery that peeling a scotch tape could, in some case, create x-rays. So this article examines it even more closely based on a very simple, seat-of-the-pants type experiment done at Maryland.

Amazing creativity and again, I absolutely love reading things like this where there's something fascinating going on that one can study with relatively simple setup. I am definitely curious to know the origin and mechanism that cause the emitted electrons to have such high energy.

Zz.

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