61. The Source
Category – Science
Dr. Cam explains that an upside-down “castle” housing The Source is made from several types of Invar. These special metal alloys don’t expand when heated (or contract when frozen). Even better for the storyline in Sign of the Rat, Invar alloys resist being squeezed. The more they shrink, the stronger they fight back. At some point, titanic amounts of force are needed to further compress a piece of Invar.
Question –
· What are the key metals used in making alloys like Invar?
Assignment – Find the answer by learning how to “cook” alloys from an animated game on the Nobel Prize organization’s website. Please be patient. It takes a while for the Flash animation to download.
Click here to research the answer.
Question –
· Who got the 1920 Nobel Prize for discovering Invar?
Assignment – Find the answer on the Nobel Prize organization’s website.
Click here to research the answer.
Question –
· Which college did research on compression causes certain metal alloys to become Invars?
Hint: Socks wears a special T-shirt to lunch in the final chapter. Which university logo appears on the T-shirt? Albert Einstein spent more time on this campus than in his home at Princeton, so you know the college is famous for theoretical physics. It’s also known for a jokester named Feynman, who wrote some well-known freshman physics texts and captured a Nobel Prize of his own.
Assignment – Find the answer on a college publication website. Below is a hotlink to the original article. Please excuse some minor typos due to conversion from normal text to website HTML. Believe it or not, scouring such articles is how we find cool stuff for Trouble’s episodes.
Click here to research the answer.
Another good source for scientific information is the Technology Review, published by MIT. A link to their website is shown below –
Click here to visit the MIT Technology Review website.
--//--
Table of Contents
Click on an image to reveal its special features.