The SMOC Project: A Series of Events Which Some May Dub as Laborious, Others as Amazing, and Others Still as Rather Insane – Part II

The email came – that herald of doom that told us a whole semester of work would be thrown away in an instant with no hope for redemption… ok, maybe not that bad in retrospect, but man, we were pretty worried.

So we threw together a game plan – we listed out the experiments we would need, when we could be in the lab, and who was going to do what.

Experiment 1 – dvdt: this experiment had been planned since March, but due to its complexity and continual material failure, it had never occurred. First, one material was too weak. Second, the material was strong enough, but had bad thermal qualities. So, we decided upon a hybrid material that would combine both by fusing the two together. What could go wrong? Well, turns out we needed more material, and wouldn’t you know it, it wouldn’t get here in time (it is now sitting upstairs in my room). 

Experiment 2 – frictionless confirmation:  This experiment should have been pretty cut and dried. Basic equations of kinematics that we learned last year… blah blah blah… we start calculations, and our numbers are off in la-la-land. After banging our head against a table (and a bench, and the wall, and each other), our professor said he would take the data and look at it.

Experiment 3 – T vs. P: We’d already done this experiment… probably gathered over 300 data points. Unfortunately, our data was qualitative instead of quantitative. It wouldn’t be hard to collect quantitative data, but we still were going to have to plot all those points again, and from previous experience, we knew that was going to take a lot of time…

God was really looking out for us those two weeks. There were so many things that could have gone wrong, so much time that needed to be spent that very few of us had. But you know what? God does neat things: He put it into the head of undergrads to spend their precious evenings and weekends in the lab running experiment after failing experiment after experiment; He put it into the head of a graduate student to pull late (as in 1:30 in the morning) and all-nighters; He put it into the head of a professor to stick with the project even when thing weren’t coming together. We are so grateful to Ali and Dr. Xu for their awesome help! We are planning to submit our work to a scientific journal this summer! Wahoo!

And now... to prove just how crazy we were... (In case you needed any proof)

PS - Some of the experiment descriptions are vague, and that's on purpose. I'm not sure how much our prof wants published just yet...