Boffins explain research with interpretive dance
Dance your Ph.D. winner scores with 'The romantic revolution of Lightness & Strength'
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Australian scientists have won this year's Dance your PhD competition, an event boffins who explain their work with interpretive dance.
Material scientist Peter Liddicoat, from the University of Sydney, took out the competition with a performance of A super-alloy is born: The romantic revolution of Lightness & Strength, describing his research quest to create materials that have high strength and low weight.
Liddicoat's no dancing dilettante – his work has made it into Nature, which in 2010 saw fit to publish his Nanostructural hierarchy increases the strength of aluminium alloys.
The winning dance tells the tale of a collaboration between and engineer and a scientist. The latter finds that “when force is applied to the perfect crystal structure of Lightness the bonds break and the atoms slip along a straight line” before “”applying torsion to redesign the atomic architecture. He applies this revolving force to the crystal, dividing it into multiple smaller parts, and creates interfaces that might block slip.”
That process works, the engineer proves it, and waltzes off into the sunset with the new material in hand, as depicted below.
Other entries to this year's competition, there were 36, are available here. ®
COMMENTS
@Everybody (so far)
Personally, I prefer a well written report with good diagrams, but, but ....
If you reject and belittle this, then you reject a novel form of communication and expression. The history of communication/computing technology is a history of experimentation by people who decided not to do things in the standard way. You should admire their experimentation and imagination and consider that this is probably why they are PhD candidates, whereas most of you (as well as me) are not.
Re: @Everybody (so far)
agreed ... I think the point is that they've done the science side more than adequately ... props to them for having fun with it, and showing that this can have a light side.
"...this year's Dance your PhD competition..."
April the first is either very early or very late.
In the immortal words of John McEnroe, 'You cannot be Sirius!'
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