Playful access to light
From 17 to 28 January 2018, the third annual light festival (Licht-Festival) will take place in Murten. A city in snow and ablaze with lights. Family outing, magical plays of light and artistic installations. Who would think first about physics here? Yet, the entire festival would simply be impossible without physics. Light and physics are inextricably linked — and the Department of Physics makes its contribution to this festival.
The Murten Licht-Festival is not only a treat for the eye. The audience can also learn to understand light in exciting experiments. From solar cells to CD players, from laser scanners to the transmission of data: we use light every day in many applications without thinking much about the underlying physics. This can be changed in the experimentation room at the Museum Murten, which Dr. Sébastien Guillaume of the Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry (Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering) and Dr. Marius Simon of the Department of Physics have set up.
At the festival, 14 experiments from the collection of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich reveal, for example, how light is deflected when passing through objects, how optical waveguides work and how music can be transmitted to our audio equipment. One of the experiments shows how lasers act on differently coloured surfaces. Even quantum-mechanical phenomena of light, such as the so-called wave–particle dualism (where light appears both as a wave and as a particle) can be explored in the experiments. But also more easily observable phenomena keep being captivating: Not only physicists can split light into its spectral colours, deflect and focus it — even children can try for themselves to do that at the 'optical wall' in the experimentation room. Some 9,000 visitors experimented with light at the Museum Murten last year.
Of course, experts are present to answer questions. And if questions should arise after the visit, then the organisers of this family event are still happy to answer them.
The experiments from the ETH "travelling circus" were built by Department of Physics apprentices and are loaned also to schools, museums or private individuals.