In the same basic spirit as the previous post, but with a physical science slant:
What items should be on the list for a scavenger hunt through an academic physics department?
The idea here is to keep a big group of grad students occupied and entertained for an afternoon by having them find items characteristic of academic physics research, such as:
- One working piece of apparatus powered by vacuum tubes
- One obviously broken piece of apparatus being kept "for spare parts"
- One obviously broken piece of apparatus being kept for no apparent reason
- One piece of computer software that's at least two versions out of date because nobody wants to deal with upgrading it
- One piece of computer hardware that's at least two versions out of date because it works, and nobody wants to deal with replacing it
- One faculty member sleeping through a seminar talk
What else needs to be on the list?
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One piece of working lab equipment that is older than anyone who works in the lab, including faculty. Example: the Welch roughing pumps in my lab, which are older than all grad students and my (not yet tenured) advisor.
These two arise frequently at my institute, though the reasons are better than "nobody wants to deal with upgrading/replacing it". We're in the space flight hardware business, so we are required to keep old versions of software around so that we can reproduce our programmable ASICs if needed. And space flight qualified CPUs are usually at least two generations behind what's in your desktop PC: the smaller the feature size, the more vulnerable it is to radiation damage.
So for my lab I would have to add the following: One computer hardware-software combination where each is at least two versions out of date, kept around because of critical mission support requirements. For other fields this could be modified to a two versions out of date piece of computer hardware that is kept around because nothing more recent can run the mission-critical piece of software for which no update is available (or that cannot be updated for any other reason).
How about a piece of apparatus that's essentially unchanged from the original 19th century (or earlier) design? eg: an old Wheatstone bridge
A slide rule.
A reel-to-reel magnetic tape.
Data collected on photographic emulsion (e.g. an astronomical plate). Slides for giving talks don't count.
A calculator with red LED display.
A book or journal in Russian.
A homemade cable of a type that could be purchased off-the-shelf.
A homemade cable of a type that could not be purchased off-the-shelf.
An oscilloscope with a CRT.
Diffraction grating material and polarizing film of the cheap, flexible kind given to undergrads for demonstrations.
Something radioactive.
The number for a pizza/take-out place on a whiteboard/blackboard.
A couch that qualifies as a public health hazard.
An "Allamagoosa"[1]
One piece of equipment that nobody really recognizes or is really certain what it is for, but was never thrown out because it looks expensive.
A Dewar flask.
The Sydney Harris "And Then a Miracle Occurs" cartoon tacked up on somebody's door, computer, or bulletin board.
[1] From the Eric Frank Russell short story of the same name. An allamagoosa is any device that really has no constructive purpose other than to "look cool" to visitors or students (it may be kept around to "demonstrate a scientific principle", but when pressed it will turn out that people are vague about what principle the device is actually demonstrating). The classic form would be cryptic boxes with lots of switches and blinking lights, but things like Jacob's ladders, Tesla coils, Whimshurst machines, and those "Newtonian demonstrator" collision ball things would also count. This is a term that I think really should be used more often.
One shoddy-looking piece of home-made electronics with a 'Danger High Voltage' sticker on it.
One rat's nest of BNC cables.
A splatter of brightly coloured dots on the floor near where a dye laser was used.
Some piece of apparatus that nobody can identify.
A faculty member with a collection of Scientific American going back to the late 60's.
On a serious note, containers of reel-to-reel magnetic tape are not toys. I sliced up my hand pretty badly trying to catch one as a frisbee.
A volume of Hilbert space, suitable containment being implicit.
A volume of a Banach space that is not Hilbert space, for wimps.
One copy of each edition of J.D. Jackson's _Classical Electrodynamics_.
An APS calender that is at least 2 years out of date.
A nuclear reactor.
Two University of Chicago undergraduates built one in a day, after all. Also for a scavenger hunt.
One course still included in the calendar but which hasn't been taught in five years or more.
A keyboard so filthy that you can hardly make out the letters on the keys.
A coffee mug (preferably from some conference held 10+ years ago) that has apparently never been washed.
A bottle of "positive test charges", and a spherical horse.
A chain of adapters to different connector types (or pipe fittings), the longer the better. E.g. Banana plug to BNC to SMA to N.
Better yet: A Swagelok-to-BNC adapter...
A cache of empty paper coffee cups (usually in a lab)
Massive tools next to delicate equipment (say, a crowbar sitting next to a STM)
Locate Texas Instruments calculators in chronological order
The grand finale at my institution would be the set of scientific equipment hidden somewhere in the physics building that can be traced back to none other than Benjamin Franklin.
A deck of punched Fortran cards.
Electronic storage media that nobody can read.
A manual for a long-gone piece of equipment.
A program from a scientific conference in a country that does not exist anymore.
A photograph from a field experiment or conference, showing at least 50 people.
A Far Side cartoon about scientists (easy)
Take a photograph of a scientist's bicycle next to a scientist's car, where the bike is the more valuable object.
A tie-dyed cloth or other Grateful Dead memorabilia hanging on the wall.
A wall-mounted pencil sharpener (preferably without cover)
A coffee pot so stained you have to shake it to see if there's liquid in it.
A message or an equation on a dry erase board written by a graduate student or post doc who's been gone for more than two years.
A homemade manometer.
I almost forgot:
5.25" floppies
A piece of equipment that still uses a plotter.
I'm a little concerned. Harry and mph (#4) just described my house!
A first edition of Feynman's Lectures.
A tenth year (or more) grad student.
A stack of Phys Rev being used to prop something up.
A "suicide cable" with a 120V line plug on one end and banana plugs (not jacks) on the other.
Nerd graffiti in the bathroom. "Fermions do it alone".
To Bob (#20): Now people know to go look in your house for the scavenger hunt! Thanks for blowing the challenge.
To Stan (#21): Now that's comedy!
I'll add another: A faculty member hand waving
Now I have to make a swagelok-to-BNC adapter.
Bob (#19) -- not to worry, my house too. The parts for a swagelok-to-BNC adapter are in the next room as I type.
And anyone who thinks a 'scope with a CRT is unusual is *way* too spoiled as far as equipment budgets go.
Oh, scavenger hunt items?
- A lead brick
- A small metal box with at least one knob or switch sticking out, entirely unlabeled. Double credit if it has the remains of scotch or masking tape where there used to be a label.
- A cable splice or connection insulated with something entirely inappropriate (scotch or masking tape, chewing gum, rubber bands...)
- a cold fusion generator
- a piece of alien technology reverse engineered from area 51
A coffee cup being used to store electronics parts.
A box of mixed, unlabeled 8-DIP ICs with bent pins.
A tray of nuts and bolts labeled "misc", containing both Imperial and metric threads.
Post-it notes or index cards, reading 'property of X do not touch!', with dates from each half-decade back to 1980.
Racquetball fragments from an LN2 demo.
A half-empty tube of epoxy resin with no matching hardener. Bonus for three or more such tubes in the same cache.
A half-empty tube of hardener with no matching resin.
A photomultiplier tube bigger than 6" (photocathode diameter)
A photomultiplier tube smaller than 1/2".
Wire bigger than AWG 3 (1/4").
Wire smaller than 50um.
Labeled or readily-identifiable samples of 15 elements heavier than Zn.
A ground loop.
"A stack of Phys Rev being used to prop something up."
Indeed, when I arrived at grad school, our Mysteriously Stained Couch (cf. my previous comment) had its sagging cushions brought up to level by a large number of "Physics Today" back issues.