At Jefferson Lab where I work we used to have a fall festival and a highlight was pumpkin launching in all manner of apparatus designed by brilliant physicists and engineers!
I've heard that if you freeze a pumpkin in liquid nitrogen for long enough and then drop it off a building, it will glow as it breaks. The phenomenon is called triboluminesence. As a chemist, I have access to both pumpkins and liquid nitrogen, but I have never tried it. It's the same principle as wintergreen lifesavers. I'm guessing it has to be pretty dark to appreciate it.
LMH I've seen triboluminescence and have long believed that it is a manifestation of the piezo electrical phenomenon. I'll bet that is the hell what it is.
3 comments:
At Jefferson Lab where I work we used to have a fall festival and a highlight was pumpkin launching in all manner of apparatus designed by brilliant physicists and engineers!
I've heard that if you freeze a pumpkin in liquid nitrogen for long enough and then drop it off a building, it will glow as it breaks. The phenomenon is called triboluminesence. As a chemist, I have access to both pumpkins and liquid nitrogen, but I have never tried it. It's the same principle as wintergreen lifesavers. I'm guessing it has to be pretty dark to appreciate it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence
LMH
I've seen triboluminescence and have long believed that it is a manifestation of the piezo electrical phenomenon. I'll bet that is the hell what it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectricity
Thanks for the salubrious dose of science.
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