The smartest thing I’ve ever done
Jan 15, 2006 in Technology by Sterling | No Comments
OK, I had a high school flashback the other day and remembered what is probably the smartest - or at least the most clever - thing I've ever done.
In senior year I was prodded into participating in the Physics Club. The extra-curricular activities sections of college applications were demanding to be fed, and while I had three sports under my belt I figured I should add some nerd stuff in order to resemble on paper the nerd that I was in reality. The club met once a month or so, but the highlight of the Physics Club calendar was the South Jersey Physics Olympics - I'm not making this up - which was held at Richard Stockton State College.
Stockton, in case you're not familiar, is not known for its physics department. Located just outside Atlantic City and relied upon by the resort community for employee training, it would have been a far more apt location for the South Jersey Restaurant and Hotel Management Olympics. But in South Jersey there was only Stockton, Glassboro (now Rowan), Trenton State (now The College of New Jersey), Rider, Princeton and a wide array of community colleges. Then as now, Princeton wanted little to do with South Jersey, and Glassboro was in the middle of nowhere. So that narrowed down the options a bit.
The Physics Olympics was broken down - just like the real Olympics! - into numerous events. One event required teams to build a mechanism that would protect an egg from a 20 foot drop. Another consisted of building a six foot free-standing tower out of a sheet of typing paper and 9 inches of Scotch tape. A third involved building a three-pound balsa wood bridge that could support 150 pounds.
My specialty was the paper tower. You make one sheet of 8.5" x 11" paper stand six feet tall by cutting it up into 0.125" strips, folding the strips down the middle and then taping the ends together to make three legs. You make triangular cross-bar supports the same way. If you do it perfectly, you can get to about 7', but 6' or 6'2" is about as high as you can go under rushed conditions. We got to 5'11" and our team wound up getting the silver - some Philadelphia suburbs kids beat us by two inches
However, there were also "surprise" events, and I wound up being assigned to compete in two of them, along with another student. It was in one of the surprise event that I did the smartest thing I've ever done.
In the first surprise event we were provided - to my recollection - a tongue depressor, three feet of twine, two (or three) small rubber bands and a 30 gallon garbage can. With this we were to construct a device which would catch an egg dropped from the rafters without breaking it. (There were three or four events that involved eggs.) I considered the provided implements for a while, and wound up constructing a rubber band and tongue depressor basket strung up in the maw of the garbage can. We precisely dropped the egg, it hit the tongue depressor as desired, then fell out and cracked. Every team broke its egg. I have revisited this scenario on dozens of occasions throughout my life, and I still have no answer. I think the physics students of Stockton State were fucking with us.
The second surprise event involved one low-wattage helium-neon laser, a room about 600 square feet in size, several buffet tables and about 75 mirrors and prisms situated on or above the tables. When turned on the laser light would bounce (and refract) around the room before ultimately striking the wall, floor or ceiling. We were given a little target circle and scotch tape, and we were supposed to stick it where we thought the laser would wind up. At the end of one half hour, the observer was to end our efforts, ask us to place the target and then turn on the laser.
The other student and I set about diagramming the path of the light. After a few minutes I realized that we were never going to get an accurate location that way, because even a tiny error would cause a cascade of increasingly larger errors. I went to the laser and stared at it, looking for a clue. Then I realized how to do it. I turned my head sideways and placed my right eye just above the laser's aperture, pointed in the direction the laser light would travel when turned on. Looking at the first mirror, I saw wall. I told the other student to walk around the room - when I saw her in the mirror I asked her to stop, and move her hand up and down the wall. When I saw her hand, I told her to place the target on that spot.
When the observer turned on the laser, the "dot" was two inches away from the target. The observer had an expression on his face that suggested both astonishment and disgust: I'd gamed the system in a way he hadn't anticipated.
At the end of the day I learned that no other team had come within several feet. Thus no other team had figured it out - including those smarty-pants rich kids from the Philly suburbs. So I felt pretty smart, and I also felt like I'd gotten even for the egg residue that was all over my clothes.
And that's pretty much the high water mark of my life as an intellectual.
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