I think I’ve spent a grand total of 1 hour in an optics lab in high school… the usual optical bench setup. I’ve see high-end labs with this kind of equipment but not done anything in them.
This Edmund optical lab starter kit costs $11,215
I’m always astonished by how much professional grade lab equipment costs https://edmundoptics.com/f/lab-starter-kits/15111/…
It’s funny how optics is a field you can get started in with lenses, mirrors, prisms, and gratings on the order of a couple of bucks each, but at the high end you get $10B instruments like JWST, which is probably more than the entire lab budgets of all high schools in the world.
Gonna work up to spectroscopy from general optics. Got an assortment of random cheap lenses, mirrors, prisms, gratings etc on amazon. Might try to make my own cheapie optical bench thingie. Surprisingly the hardest thing to find was a ray box, so gonna make my own.
I think I’m trying to develop a sort of budget renaissance high school sci-tech lab without artificial distinctions among physics/chemistry/biology/astronomy/shop-class/electronics/instruments… I’ll need a dedicated lab room soon. One corner of my office ain’t cutting it.
Besides the one well-defined rover project I have no idea where I’m going with any of this. It’s really been random acts of tinkering. Half-ass forays into astrophotography, clockmaking, microscopy.
Goal for this foray is fun with infrared, but starting with visible spectrum to develop intuitions. Also IR requires way more expensive stuff looks like.
Working my way up to a mad scientist lab. The 3 big elements I don’t yet have a plan for:
1. A suitable space capable of handling chemistry, combustion etc
2. A highly skilled Igor
3. One crazy extreme gizmo that pulls the lab together
I kinda dislike how sci-comm and science education types get all excited by how much you can do with just an iPhone and common household crap. I get the democratization/access part but the exciting cool factor is getting to the exotic stuff.
It’d be fun to try and design a minimum viable mad science lab to fit in a shipping container for under 50k. You could drop off a thousand in random places around the world and spark a science revolution for $50m. Comes with solar power, compute, Starlink and Mini Me IgorBot.
Now I want to add electrochemistry to my lab next... stepping stone to full chemistry. Seems like a number of simple electroplating and battery experiments could be done with relatively safe chemicals etc.
I'd never heard of this "Baghdad battery" ... apparently the ancient Iraqis might have discovered primitive electroplating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery…
N-BK7 is a relatively cheap material that works in a wide overlap of visible and IR. My biggest problem with IR is that alignment is extra annoying when you can’t see the beam (they make fluorescent cards and electronic viewers though)