Thousands of people gathered at Tallahassee’s Innovation Park on Saturday. They were there for the annual open house at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
It wasn’t just the world’s largest electro-magnets that brought the crowds packing into the vast lab complex. Deputy Director Tim Murphy says it’s also to witness the many demonstrations. Such as the shrinking quarter display.
“And you see the flash, because the coil of wire has just turned into plasma to produce the magnetic field that has shrunk the quarter down to the size of a dime.”
Across the street at the Superconductivity Lab, Chief of Staff Chris Segal was spinning visitors around on a metal turntable suspended in space.
“At the end of the day, human levitation is certainly easy to talk to the community about and helps us provide outreach to explain the incredible science we’re doing here at the Mag Lab.”
This year’s open house theme plumbed the connection between books and science. Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler talked about how he’s using AI science to help research his writing topics, as well as the future for intelligent machines.