Scrounging for Fun and Profit

Guinnessy writes: "According to Toni Feder on Physics Today, scrounging used equipment is worthwhile if you can avoid the pitfalls of wasting time and compromising scientific goals. Feder interviews experimenters who have dug up everything from dewars to nuclear reactors."

Inheritance...

[Moonshadow]

When Bruno Bauer inherited Zebra, a retired 2-trillion-watt pulsed-power machine...

Man, I wish my rich uncle would die and leave me a 2-trillion-watt pulsed-power machine!

Free Dewars?

[still cynical]

Whoohoo! Count me in!

Although...you suppose they didn't mean Scotch?

dumpster diving

[Anonymous Coward]

well, like the guy in the article, i wouldn't mind picking up a petawatt laser myself... unfortunately, i doubt my mom would let me keep it in the basement.

(some people just don't appreciate legitimate scientific inquiry!)

Heh....

[EFGearman]

Think about it for a second. A whole new season of junkyard wars... With nukes...

Eric Gearman

who woulda thunk

[Dambiel]

research scientists scrounge around for stuff?

It makes perfect sense, i know a few researchers who go out every weekend to scrounge for some Dewars [dewars.com].

Television

[cnkeller]

Anyone else see potential for Laboratory Wars?

Re:Heh....

[tuffy]

"On this week's challenge, you'll have just ten hours to build a working fission reactor. Then, tomorrow morning, whoever can generate the most watts of electricity in one hour will move on to the semifinals."

(Anyone else excited about the new season airing in the US on September 12?)

Re:Go check out your physics dept's unused rooms

[Chris Y Taylor]

Back when I was in college I helped the physics dept. clean out their junk room. In exchange, they let me keep whatever I wanted out of the unneeded equipment. I got some really big lenses, some nice frount surface mirrors, and a tube powered oscilloscope that was originally purchased for NASA's Gemini program (and still had the appropriate labels on it). I had trouble explaining to the campus police why I was pushing a "late model oscilloscope" back to my dorm at 3am, but when they found out I was an mech. engineering major they smiled knowingly and left me alone. Among the uses I put it to was helping keep my underheated dorm room warm in the winter.

Think what *I* could do with that thing...

[mblase]

As part of the NTF, the Petawatt will be open to the wider user community. Bauer and his colleagues plan to use it for fusion energy, plasma, atomic physics, environmental, and materials science studies, as well as in research for stockpile stewardship--

--and nobody's yet proposed taking charge of it for the sole purpose of world domination? What's wrong with these geeks??

The things I would do with a petawatt laser combined with, say, a small collection of orbiting satellites simply boggle the mind....

Re:Warning about scrounging

[Johnny5000]

Before my computer programming days I worked in a biology lab.

Not only did we find a bunch of mystery chemicals with no labels, but we found herring sperm.

Unfortunately it was expired. Oh, the things I could have done with the herring sperm.

That's got to be quite a job, working in the herring sperm factory.

*wakes up in the morning*
"Dammit, If I have to whack off one more herring, I'm going to die. I'll just die."

"oh lord, when will you dry up this river of herring sperm I see before me?"

-J5K