For the life of Arteculate, we’ve been writing mostly about technological goings-on in the realm of consumer electronics. But clearly society and technology have a relationship that goes far outside of this small little space, and that’s why we’re posting today after a long hiatus.
The oil spill in the Gulf, albeit mired as much in human failures as it is in technological ones, is the kind of disaster that we can’t help but write about. And if there’s anything that makes us want to devote our attention to the unprecedented environmental disaster that is the oil spill, it’s an extremely logical solution to the problem that has just been posed by a leading physicist, Dr. Louis Bloomfield of the University of Virginia.
His plan is simple, yet his tactics novel: put a clog in the well that the oil pressure cannot force out. To do it, he proposes sending down extremely dense metal rods, rods which will flow through the rising oil “like a knife through butter.” Keep layering these rods on top of one another for mile after mile until the oil is limited to a small trickle, and the problem is solved. Honestly, our words do not do his plan justice, and thankfully Dr. Bloomfield has created a video in which he explains via an experiment just how his solution works.
Dr. Louis Bloomfield’s expertise has been sought many times in the past; he has been on the news numerous times, answering such questions as whether a penny dropped off the Empire State Building could kill a bystander or why liquids in Pyrex containers could explode after being microwaved and then agitated. Recently he costarred in Discovery’s “Some Assembly Required,” and he has also written a book, How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life.
