A Moment Of Silence

A brief moment of silence, please, for Don Herbert, better known as Mr. Wizard. He died yesterday, at the ripe age of 89 (hat tip to Faithful Reader E.S., who e-mailed me about this.)

I have no particularly strong memories of the 80's show, 'Mr. Wizard's World', which I often watched on Nickelodeon when I was a kid. But I remember the show dearly for it's low production value (contrary to, say, Bill Nye the science guy, Mr. Wizard almost always did his experiments with products you could buy at the hardware store) and fascinating ways he came up with explaining the natural world.

The one I most remember is when he demonstrated the concept of a chain reaction. He was discussing how nuclear reactions occur, and talked about the concept of critical mass. As a demo, he used a big plastic box, with mousetraps with ping-pong balls on top of them. With only a few mousetraps, setting one off would launch its ping-pong ball into the air, but it would come to a halt without setting off any others. A few more, and still the same. But only a few more, and suddenly there was a 'critical mass', where every ping-pong ball launched set off at least one more, and now one ball dropped in the box set off every single mousetrap before the bouncing was done. Very cool, and surprisingly similar to what happens in the core of a nuclear bomb, with nuclei taking the place of mousetraps, and neutrons as the ping-pong balls.

Today, the world is a slightly less interesting place for his passing.