Physics on Etsy!

Element 10: Neon 

Get this high quality cube here:

From ProtoshopLLC: BUY NOW: Lucite Cube Element 10 Neon

Need a mini Tesla Coil?
From engineDIY: BUY NOW: Mini Tesla Coil

Element 10, Neon: a pure sample of the famous noble gas in a glass ampule encased within a lucite cube. But how can we know that the glass tube is actually filled with neon gas? If the sample is brought near the 50,000 Volt high frequency electric field of a miniature Tesla coil, the gas will glow with the characteristic orange light from the electron energy transitions specific only to neon. Note that the glow deceases as the sample is moved away from the coil in proportion to the electric field intensity- and that there is an excitation threshold, the gas needs a higher intensity (closer to coil) to initiate the glow discharge but will still glow when moved further away. 

Balance Stacking Sculpture

Another wonderful desing by BinDesign- get one here in black or natural wood:

From Etsy: BUY NOW: Bin Design Balancer Puzzle

Balance Stacking Sculpture: a series of torques in unstable equilibrium complete this Calder-esque structure. As each component is added its weighted end balances all the others before it, with the initial small piece weighing about a gram or so. Remove the end piece and the whole structure comes down. Another wonderful design by artist Bin Xu.

Aperiodic Monotile

Learn more about this recent math dicovery here: An aperiodic monotile (arXiv)

Althogh the math says they can tile the plane, getting them to do so is more challenging than one might think! 
Get a set of laser cut hat tiles here:
From Etsy: BUY NOW: "the Hat" monotile set

See other aperoidic tilings in my collection.

Aperiodic Monotile: this newly discovered 13 sided shape, named “the hat”, will tessellate a plane to infinity, similar to how squares or hexagons can tile out with no gaps. However the hat tiles the plane aperiodically- if one tries to shift a part of a hat tiling, the shifted part will not align or match up with any other part of the same tiling- all the way out to infinity! The fact that aperiodic tessellations exist at all is pretty amazing, and Sir Roger Penrose (Nobel prize in physics 2020) is also famous for discovering a pair of regularly shaped polygons that tile in this aperiodic way. However it was not clear until a few weeks ago if a single shaped tile could tessellate aperiodically when the hat was described in a paper by Smith, Myers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss uploaded to arXiv March 20. 


Penrose Tiling Puzzle

This puzzle was produced and sold in the 1990s. 
The individual tiles can be found on eBay (and sometimes the whole puzzle): 

From eBay: Search NOW Penrose Pentaplex Puzzle 
Wikipedia has the details on Penrose Tilings and their inventor Sir Roger Penrose (Recently won Nobel Prize!) 
A nice basic version of Penrose Tilings is available here: 
From Etsy: BUY NOW Penrose Tiles 

Penrose Tiling Puzzle: a challenging puzzle with pieces that come in only two shapes. Sir Roger Penrose- who just yesterday won the Nobel prize in physics for his contributions to General Relativity- also discovered tessellations (tilings) that are aperiodic even though the two tile types are regularly shaped polygons. If one tries to shift a part of a Penrose tiling, the shifted part will not align or match up with any other part of the same tiling- all the way out to infinity! This puzzle, entitled “Perplexing Poultry”, created and sold by Penrose himself, uses polygons modified into crazy looking birds such that the tiles can only connect in specific ways to ensure the non-repetitive nature of the Penrose tiling structure. Shown here is one way these two tile types will fill the plane.