Thursday 2 October 2014

Harvest window: the Braggs and X-ray crystallography



I have made a harvest festival window display for St Mary's based on the upcoming centenary of the Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to William Henry and William Lawrence Bragg for X-ray crystallography. I used wire as the X-rays and made a molecule out of jelly babies and spaghetti. I linked it to the discovery of the structure of DNA by this method, with DNA being at the root of life on Earth and thus rather relevant to harvest. Melvyn Bragg made an In Our Time programme about X-ray crystallography and found out that he was distantly related to the Nobel laureates. You can find his programme here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p0s9s My display will be in St Mary's this weekend.