Humans aren’t the only ones seeking stability in an unstable world. Even tiny, unconscious objects need balance. You can see similar patterns in wax honeycombs, fly’s eyes and soap bubbles.
Pakistani student making waves in the world of physics
Humans aren’t the only ones seeking stability in an unstable world. Even tiny, unconscious objects need balance. You can see similar patterns in wax honeycombs, fly’s eyes and soap bubbles.
Physicists knew of this phenomenon decades before Muhammad Shaheer Niazi, a 17-year-old high school student from Pakistan met the electric honeycomb. In 2016, as one of the first Pakistani participants in the International Young Physicists’ Tournament, he replicated the phenomenon and presented his work as any professional scientist would. But he also developed photographic evidence of charged ions creating the honeycomb, and published his work on Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
But first: How does the honeycomb form?
Just about every electronic device in your home contains capacitors, which store electricity, a bit like a battery. Electricity travels from the top electrode, through the insulator, to the bottom, or ground electrode.
An electric honeycomb behaves like a capacitor. In this case, the top electrode is a needle that delivers high voltage to the air just a few centimetres above a thin layer of oil on the other flat, grounded surface electrode.
The high voltage strips molecules in the air of their electrons, and creates what’s called a corona discharge, pouring down these electrically charged particles, or ions, like water from a fountain, onto the surface of the oil. Just as lightning strives to strike the ground, these ions want to hit their ground electrode. But because oil is an inefficient conductor, they can’t get through it.
The ions start accumulating on top of the oil until their force is too much. They sink down, forming a dimple in the oil that exposes the bottom electrode, allowing them to find their ground.
But now, the surface of the oil is no longer even. Within milliseconds, dozens of hexagonal shapes form in the layer that help maintain the equilibrium nature demands.
To prove that the ions were moving, Shaheer photographed images of the shadows formed by their wind as they exited the needle and recorded the heat presumed to come from the friction of their travel through the oil. Heat appeared to originate at the needle, and dissipate outward, increasing with time - even five minutes after the honeycomb formed.
Shaheer hopes to further explore the mathematics of the electric honeycomb, and in the future, dreams of earning a Nobel Prize.
Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Nobel Prize in Literature
Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature for a run of “exquisite” novels that the award body said mixed Franz Kafka with Jane Austen.
The award of the 9-million-crown ($1.1-million) prize marks a return to a more mainstream interpretation of literature a year after it went to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
According to the Academy, the themes of “memory, time and self-delusion” weave through his work, particularly in The Remains of the Day which won Ishiguro the Booker prize in 1989 and was adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins as the “duty-obsessed” butler Stevens.
Ishiguro was praised by the Swedish Academy for novels which “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” and were driven by a “great emotional force”.
Kazuo was sitting in the kitchen when his agents called and let him listen to the Nobel announcement live over the phone, without knowing he would win.
