Splash Biography

Exploding space shuttles, collapsing bridges, exploding naval guns… sometimes designs fail, and sometimes they fail catastrophically. These failures can be dramatic, deadly, or sometimes just plain silly, but they have one thing in common: they are all preventable. In this class we’ll cover the technical missteps behind some famous engineering disasters (and some you may never have heard of).

Exploding space shuttles, collapsing bridges, exploding naval guns… sometimes designs fail, and sometimes they fail catastrophically. These failures can be dramatic, deadly, or sometimes just plain silly, but they have one thing in common: they are all preventable. In this class we’ll cover the technical missteps behind some famous engineering disasters (and some you may never have heard of). We’ll talk about how smart people can make bad designs, the importance of communication, and especially the value of common sense.

Exploding space shuttles, collapsing bridges, exploding naval guns… sometimes designs fail, and sometimes they fail catastrophically. These failures can be dramatic, deadly, or sometimes just plain silly, but they have one thing in common: they are all preventable. In this class we’ll cover the technical missteps behind some famous engineering disasters (and some you may never have heard of). We’ll talk about how smart people can make bad designs, the importance of communication, and especially the value of common sense.

Exploding space shuttles, collapsing bridges, exploding naval guns… sometimes designs fail, and sometimes they fail catastrophically. These failures can be dramatic, deadly, or sometimes just plain silly, but they have one thing in common: they are all preventable. In this class we'll cover the technical missteps behind some famous engineering disasters (and some you may never have heard of). We'll talk about how smart people can make bad designs, the importance of communication, and especially the value of common sense.

We all know the standard high school chemistry explanation: metals conduct, insulators insulate, and semiconductors can't make up their minds. Let's go beyond that. We'll start out by exploring the electronic structure of semiconductors and what it is that makes them so useful. Then we'll move on to looking at what types of devices can be made from semiconductors -- everything from LEDs to solar cells!

Have you ever wondered what most solids actually look like on the atomic scale? How do the atoms stack together? What sort of patterns do they follow? Why can something that’s strong and brittle and something that’s weak and ductile be made of the same material? In this class, we’ll talk about the structure of metals and other solids whose atoms tend to arrange themselves into ordered patterns. We’ll talk about the energetics of solid formation, and how these materials behave under stress.