In the same basic spirit as the previous post, but with a physical science slant:
What items should be on the list for a scavenger hunt through an academic physics department?
The idea here is to keep a big group of grad students occupied and entertained for an afternoon by having them find items characteristic of academic physics research, such as:
- One working piece of apparatus powered by vacuum tubes
- One obviously broken piece of apparatus being kept “for spare parts”
- One obviously broken piece of apparatus being kept for no apparent reason
- One piece of computer software that’s at least two versions out of date because nobody wants to deal with upgrading it
- One piece of computer hardware that’s at least two versions out of date because it works, and nobody wants to deal with replacing it
- One faculty member sleeping through a seminar talk
What else needs to be on the list?