Vísindavaka 2025

Members of the CMBeam team participated in Vísindavaka 2025, an annual science outreach event which is meant to inspire young people. This time, our booth was equipped with a 2.4-m diameter gravity demonstrator, some videos (in Icelandic) on various astrophysics activities at the University of Iceland, a Hoberman sphere, a few perpetual motion machines and Stirling engines, diffraction gratings, lasers, and calcite crystals.

We upgraded our gravity simulator from last year, going from 1.5 to 2.4-m diameter which allowed for a lot of new demonstrations. We were particularly happy with simulations of solar system formations which we could perform by giving every child 2-3 marbles and having half of them throwin clockwise and the other half counter-clockwise. After a bunch of collisions, only a few marbles would remain in orbit around the central mass and they were typically all going in the same direction!

We did have a slight scare early in the day: A tear appeared in the seam of the fabric near the center of the sheet. We literally had a tear in the fabric of spacetime… Thankfully Katrin Hekla was able to solve the problem since we had brought a thread and needle just in case :)