Cosmic Ray Detector

摘要

One of the perks of my position as editor of Nuts & Volts is that I get to work with experimentalists, hobbyists, engineers, and scientists who are eager to share their experiments and projects with other readers. While there is the occasional perpetual motion machine or circuit that seems like something repurposed from a 1970's electronics magazine, most are right on. And sometimes there are contributions that are intriguing but don't have the scientific underpinnings to make it into print - it just wouldn't be fair to readers. For example, I recently had to turn down an article that described how to build a "cosmic ray detector." The author was an exceptional writer and builder, but he couldn't back up his assertion that the device he described actually detected cosmic rays. In fact, he couldn't specify the type of cosmic rays his device was designed to detect.