Teacher: Ms. Haigo Dolmayan
Can beauty and truth intersect at all? The STEM club members were about to find out during their weekly challenge. The members were divided into teams and each team had 20 minutes to take a photo in the school premises, and then apply one of the two categories – a natural photo of everyday situations that may demonstrate a variety of physics concepts, or a contrived photo that is set up to show a particular physics concept or related set of concepts.
The teams came up with some interesting ideas a few of which are listed below:
“Parallel Universe in Water”
This contrived photo demonstrates the concept of reflection of light explicitly. Reflection is the change in direction of a wavefront at an interface between two different media so that the wavefront returns into the medium from which it originated. Common examples include the reflection of light, sound and water waves. Having this in mind, the members of this team took a picture in which they showed the reflection of the basketball stand and many other trees through a very small amount of water poured on the ground. They spilt some water on the ground, and then took the photo from a certain angle so that the background image would be reflected in the water; its upside down image is due to reflection. You see the reflection in water because a water surface is neither a perfect mirror nor thoroughly invisible. This concept is similar to seeing your own reflection in the water.
Part of the light rays from you are reflected on the water surface so that you can see your image. A part of the light rays reaching the bottom of the pond are scattered by the objects there and also fall into your eyes.
“Trapped in a Bottle”
This photo clearly describes the properties of refraction of light through converging lenses.Typically, a converging lens inverts the image you are looking at, when the object is located at a distance larger than the lens’ focal length.
The water in the bottle functions as a lens and hence inverts the image. The combination of the angle at which the photo is taken and the distance the bottle is strategically positioned away from the wall trap the inverted image in the bottle.
“Float/Sink- it’s all a matter of perspective”
This photo of a leaf floating in a sink full of water with its image reflected from the metallic surface at the bottom reveals two physics concepts: density and reflection.
First, the concept of density is verified since leaves contain chloroplasts; which make sugars using sunlight. This is called photosynthesis. One of the by-products of this process is Oxygen. This oxygen sits in the Parenchyma, which is in the middle of the leaf. This gives the leaf a lower density than water; so it floats on its surface.
Second, when light strikes the surface of a (non-metallic) material, it bounces off in all directions due to multiple reflections by the microscopic irregularities inside the material and by its surface, if it is rough. Thus, an ‘image’ is not formed. On the other hand, light reflected from a metal surface with an angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection which forms an image.
This explains the optical illusion behind the same leaf floating and sinking simultaneously.
The photos were assessed by the school’s renowned physics teacher Mr Raymond Saber. He evaluated the photos based on two main criteria: the general quality of the photo and the accuracy of the scientific explanation presented by the participants.
The photo entitled “float/sink…it’s all a matter of perspective” was ranked the first, thus the photo’s owners: Mery Najarian (Grade 8), Avo Hagopian (Grade 8) and Maral Giritlian (Grade 7) were qualified to compete in the LAU sciences fair physics photo contest.
Overall this experience enabled us to explore the relationship between the arts and sciences. We learned how both can mutually influence and elevate the other in our age of digital revolution. The overlap of the two disciplines was stunning and although not completely, it revealed that art and science complement one another. Art shows us while science explains how it is or why it is so thus breaking the wall between the “two cultures” once believed to be utterly separated.
