GE’s Super Bowl commercial features engineers making power plant turbines that “make the power that makes the beer.” Credit: GE; NFL.

So, the Super Bowl is all about three things: football, the commercials and the half-time show.

Super Bowl XLVI is history now and will be deconstructed for quite some time. As my football ignorance is vast, I have nothing to add, except to note that it was a good game and more fun to watch than many have been. The only thing I would have changed was the outcome!

But, I’m stoked about the commercials. Did you notice how many materials science commercials there were? I especially like the heroic portrayal of engineers and in the GE commercial, “Power and Beer.”

Here’s what I caught. Did you see any that I missed? Which one did you like best?

1. Bud Light Platinum - Features a stylized beer bottle manufacturing line, which begins with a fantastical blue stream of molten glass. Obviously, it was a CG production, but I would have liked to see a red hot glass flow cool to a blue bottle, and no harm would have come to the beer. The blue molten glass stream felt all wrong. Also, I’m not sure about the marketing thinkology behind naming an amber brew “Platinum,” a metal that definitely is not amber hued, but I will always welcome a materials connection to a consumer product.

2. Bridgestone tires - Bridgestone bought several spots with the theme of “bringing tire technology to the world of sports,” where a team of white-coated engineers used advanced polymer tire technology to engineer footballs, basketballs and hockey pucks with extraordinary properties. The spots struck me as clever, and the depiction of the engineers as friendly caricatures.

3. GE, “Power and Beer” - This was my favorite because it was intelligent, true and relevant. Engineers are shown explaining what turbines are, how they are made and what they do, which is to make power (in this case). The engineers are depicted as genuine and approachable, people we’d like to have a beer with. And, indeed, the commercial shows the GE team stopping at the local pub for a cold one, where the other patrons ask them what they do for a living. Keeping it simple, the answer comes back, “We make the power for making the beer.” We see the “ah-ha” moment dawn, and a cheer erupt for the heroic engineers who make the power for making the beer!

And what about the “Material Girl’s” halftime show? I’m not going to waste any pixels on Ms. M, except to observe that this may have been an historic performance for her—she ended the show wearing more than when the show started. Maturity? Middle age? The former is unlikely; the latter is inevitable.

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Screenshot from live webcam of the “Pitch Drop Experiment” at the University of Queensland in Australia. The experiment, begun in 1927, demonstrates the fluid nature of tar pitch at room temperature. Credit: U. Queensland, Australia.

Would you start an experiment that took three years to set up, yielded it’s first result eight years later and generated an average of one data point per decade? Botanists make the news now and then when something like the stinky “corpse flower” blooms once every ten years, but in the physical world, things tend to happen faster.

In 1927, University of Queensland’s first physics professor, Thomas Parnell, want to demonstrate that materials are not always what they seem. Tar pitch, for example, appears to be a brittle solid at room temperature and will shatter if struck with a hammer.

To demonstrate that tar pitch is actually a fluid, Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a glass funnel with a sealed stem. He allowed three years for the pitch to settle into the funnel, cut the seal in 1930 and waited.

Parnell was a patient man.

The first drop of pitch fell from the funnel in 1938, and a drop has fallen about once per decade since then. The ninth drop fell in November 2000.

Nobody has ever seen any of the drops fall. According to a story in the Brisbane Times, efforts to record the 2000 drip were foiled when the webcam equipment failed. The current curator of the experiment, UQ physics professor John Mainstone, estimates that the next drop will fall sometime around 2013.

The Brisbane Times story reports that the Guinness Book of World Records has recognized it as the longest running experiment in the world. The record is unlikely to be broken. Mainstone estimates that there is enough pitch in the funnel for the experiment to last another century or so. That means a yet-to-be-born Parnell will have to finish the experiment that his great-great-great grandfather started.

And, for those who have lots of time on their hands, the experiment can be watched via live webcam at the university’s webpage about the experiment.

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Rodin’s bronze and marble sculpture, The Thinker. How does he do it? Credit: Wikipedia.

Most of us think for a living. Our outputs—experiments, talks, papers, etc.—are evidence of our having thought productively.

Do you ever wonder how thinking works?

If you are curious, you might want to schedule a trip to the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University to visit the new art exhibition, “How ‘Thinks’ Work“

The press release says “it is an exhibition designed to explore the human thinking process in relation to mathematics, human perception, philosophy, language and nature. The title alludes to the common phrase, “How Things Work,” and suggests the treatment of the thinking process as a universal mechanism.”

It opens Nov. 29 and runs through March 1, 2012.

I’m thinking about going. You?

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I am ashamed I overlooked the 20th birthday of the Oughtred Society. Picture via the International Slide Rule Museum.

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Being neither a physicist nor a mathematician, Shakespeare probably knew very little about nothing. This painting of the Bard is hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Credit: Wikipedia

Try explaining this to the family at Thanksgiving dinner.

Modern physicists Adam Brown and Alex Dahlen have made a study of nothing. They say it can be an endpoint or a starting point for tunneling, and in their paper (pdf) they posit, “If the universe can tunnel to nothing, it is natural to ask whether it can tunnel from nothing—the quantum creation of a universe.’

Mostly, these guys like to do math—specifically, topology. And, doing enough math “gives us a controlled setting in which to understand nothing,” according to the abstract posted on the online forum for early airing of new physics ideas, Physics arXiv.

Brown and Dahlen are no slouches; Brown is at Princeton and Dahlen is affiliated with Princeton and Berkeley. Their paper goes into a rigorous discussion on bubbles, flux, spacetime topology, the space next to nothing and the creation of the universe.

Apparently, nothing is not so easy to understand, or at least to quantify. The paper concludes with

“[Perhaps] we are asking the wrong question. There’s so much we don’t understand—about the breakdown of the spacetime description at the smallest scales, about quantum gravity, about the ultimate building blocks of existence—that most likely we don’t yet even possess the vocabulary to ask a well-posed question. One thing seems clear though: To truly understand everything, we must understand nothing.”

Before riffing on how you, too, would “love to work at nothing all day,” (Bachman Turner Overdrive, Taking Care of Business), think about similar intellectual pursuits in the materials world.

For example, consider the growing body of work on complexions (complex interfaces), which occupy the space between a grain and the “adjacent” grain boundary.

Or, what about nanoporous materials—materials that are interesting because they are mostly not there?

Just a few things to ponder as you drift off …into nothing.

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