Unless your friends and family are meth addicts, the idea of making gifts for them in the lab probably didn’t come immediately to you.  Never mind that – we won’t be making any drugs here, but rather wonderful pieces of art with the help of a few common (or not so common) instruments and chemicals – most of which you can find in a hardware store or a DOE lab.

As I’ve mentioned a few times here on the blog I have at my disposal a DOE lab which isn’t very far away from where I’m sitting now.  It’s stocked full of goodies that hurl radiation and electrons at shit with tremendous tenacity and, ultimately, result in things either blowing the fuck up or producing science of some nature.  One of those things are totally awesome Lichtenberg figures.  To make these, I took a trip with my good buddy The Canuck, who appears to know how to use the instruments, to our DOE lab to cook some awesome shit up.

For whatever reason it was decided that the Linac wasn’t going to cut it so we headed to the Van de Graaff – a large football shaped tank with a long pipe coming out of it that directs and focuses the beam of electrons produced in said large football shaped tank.  It seemed as though Lichtenberg figures should be made out of acrylic (though, according to Wiki they can be made out of glass – it just takes MORE POWER) and I grabbed what I thought was a pretty piece of acrylic I got from my boss off my desk and took it over there for blowing the fuck up into pretty awesome looking shit.

So, the piece of (what I thought to be) acrylic was positioned in front of the “out” port of this thing, which is covered in tin foil for, what I’m assured to be, a scientific necessity.  (The Canuck is positioning it for execution.)  Point being, you see, is that if you cram enough electrons into this fucker – even though it’s an insulator – it will eventually conduct them out to a ground.  The flow of electrons thus creates the awesome tree patterns you find in that Wiki article or here at this site with a shitton of them and a bit of a description on how to make them.

We left the room and turned the instrument on from a remote computer and through the monitor you could clearly see the fucking thing glow.  It even started to pulse… it was wild.  But it didn’t discharge, so after about 60 seconds of hard core electron gang banging, we walked into the room and saw that the fucking thing had blackened and, upon taping it, it did a shitty little electrical discharge.  The most remarkable thing was that it cracked a little on the inside of the thing, but it wasn’t all that great.  Upon closer inspection (i.e. by throwing it on the ground) I discovered it was made out of glass and not acrylic.  My boss actually gave me a nice little paper weight that I thought was a little shitty piece of plastic.  OH WELL.  Anyway, we repeated the process with a block of acrylic and got the desired results

I dunno what that unnatural color is, but it goes away after a bit.  It’s pretty slick though.  This was just a piece of acrylic The Canuck found laying around the lab.  A nice piece would produce a much nicer result.

Efforts in this area are ongoing.

Next, I’ll show you how to make a candle that is one color when it’s unlit and another when you light it up!