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It'd be really fun to race Nmr/MassSpec/Ir/Raman teams to see who can make a cheaper home gamer analysis tool. My money would be on mass spec, although it requ
by alpineidyll3 6y ago
It'd be really fun to race Nmr/MassSpec/Ir/Raman teams to see who can make a cheaper home gamer analysis tool.
My money would be on mass spec, although it requires high voltage and vacuum. Back in my old university days Zbigniew Gasnaya made a home gamer mass spec that worked fine for what looked to be about 300$ in today's parts
3 high DC voltage plates, a harbor freight vacuum, an amp...
- CamperBob2 6y agoBen Krasnow took some steps in that direction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIKhUizkXxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIKhUizkXxA As with his Raman setup, there were some good questions raised in the comments about whether he really saw the effect in question or just got lucky with plausible-appearing artifacts. It's hard to assess validity from the presented results alone, which is unfortunately common in Ben's videos. In the Raman video, he didn't test anything but a single styrofoam cup, and in the mass-spec video he didn't do the obvious baseline run with a clean filament. Ben's channel is one of those rare ones where the comments are worth reading. You can really see how easy it is for a scientist to inadvertently fool themselves and others. I often end up yelling at the screen, but it's still my favorite YouTube channel of all time.
- alpineidyll3 6y agoI'm a huge fan of Ben's. In all honesty Zbignew was definitely more talented at munging together homebrew instruments. But who could compete with that old timey eastern bloc science curriculum ;). I think Ben's misused over there at google. He should be designing the national high school science lab curriculum.