The first real experiment — and it was Einstein's
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
The summer after his sophomore year of high school, on a USC recruitment program, Jonathan Hare worked in the Aerospace Engineering department programming a PDP-8 to control a laser.
The experiment: a large clear flume establishing laminar water flow, into which aerodynamic shapes — fuselages, wings, torpedo-shaped submersibles — were lowered. Tiny particles were injected and filmed at high speed to see where flow stayed laminar and where it turned turbulent. A rapidly swept laser, bounced off silver-coated mirrors to avoid distortion, illuminated a moving plane through the particle stream so the flow could be visualized.
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The PDP-8 was a vertical rack on wheels with a keyboard and monitor halfway up and cables everywhere, and it was doing nothing else, so it was assigned to run a small laser. Hare's job was to program it and assemble the laser and the little motors that swept the mirrors.
He once touched a silver-coated mirror with a fingertip. The print embedded itself in the silver, ruined that run of the experiment, and was a considerable nuisance to repair.
Particle transport in fluid boundary layers rests on Brownian motion — the subject of the fourth and least cosmologically dramatic of Einstein's 1905 papers. Hare's first real scientific experiment was built on Einstein's work, twenty-five years before he attended the centenary of the year that produced it.
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Recruited early, and shown what wealth looked like
Open →whose machine it wasVAX, VMS, PDP — and the machines Hare learned on
Open →who moderated the centenary of the paper it rests onProposed and named quarks; would not give up his own nomenclature
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