Raman wins!
Mar 16th 2007Wallabynerd alert
Or rather, a high school student won the Intel Science Talent Search by building a Raman spectroscope at home for about $300. “Using a laser as her light source, Mary tested several household objects and solvents and compared her results to published wave numbers.” I’m not 100% sure this is worth $100,000 scholarship…
On the one hand, yay! Raman! (A big chunk of my Ph.D. dissertation was building a very expensive Raman microscope.)
On the other hand, it sounds like she adapted a well-known design and aimed it at random things. Perhaps it’s just that I’m more familiar with what’s involved in this project than the others, but I’m not sure that that shows greater creativity and depth of insight than some of the other top ten projects.
In any case, at least there’s slightly more information available about her project than that provided by CNN, which “explained” that “Spectrographs… measure wave lengths” and “are used in research such as astronomy and medicine and in industry.” I really wonder if there’s some kind of prize for worst science reporting. Certainly there’s a need to make sure that the content is “accessible” to everyone, but that doesn’t mean that the reporter should show understanding clearly inferior to that of the high school student who did the work.
