Project Urinal
Not an impressive portrait of Joe, but it does show The Urinal
and associated Building 20 appurtenances.
With classmate Joe Ladish, I undertook what we called (though never to its face) “Project Urinal” to satisfy the Senior Thesis requirement. Professor Clark consented to supervise the project, which actually ended up comporting a modicum of originality.1 Joe and I became the very first,2 as it turned out, to demonstrate, physically, experimentally, and quantitatively, that photons of electromagnetic radiation carry angular momentum (that is, that they “twist as they go”).3 The “Urinal” was actually a wave-guide which we designed to produce circularly-polarized4 microwaves; we tuned it with the two brass screws you see hanging down. A cylindrical absorber was suspended as a torsion pendulum, and the gizmo Joe’s looking through measured the angle through which the absorber twisted when we turned on the juice.
1I’m told that the PSSC (Physical Science Study Committee) actually made one of its (once-famous) instructional film-loops out of our little demonstration, for use in high-school physics classes. I never saw it, if so.
2And, I imagine, the last.
3Not that anybody was surprised at our result. All the theories predicted, then and now, that light, radio waves, gamma rays, microwaves, etc., would twist as they go. It’s just inconvenient to demonstrate it in practice. The Real News, as Taranto likes to say, would have arisen if we’d proved the contrary.
4So that all the photons twist in the same direction, rather than cancelling out each other’s twist.
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