Science is Fun Fridays!

 

Earlier this year we touched on cymatics - the science of visible sound.

Then it was Chladni plates, and now it's Ruben's tube.

While the plates were a study in acoustics and vibrations, the tube shows the relationship between sound waves and sound pressure.

Heinrich Rubens was a German physicist born in 1865.  He worked with Max Planck on some of the ground work for quantum physics, but he is best known for his flame tube, first demonstrated in 1905.

I like the trumpet.

When sound is applied from one end of the tube, it changes the internal pressure.

The tallest flames occur at pressure nodes, and the lowest at antinodes.  The antinodes correspond to the locations with the highest amount of compression and rarefaction.