NOW OPEN!
A New Special Exhibition in the
MacLean Engineering Gallery at Dynamic Earth
There’s lots of stuff to study in materials science because everything around you is made of materials: like the metals in bicycles, the plastic in contact lenses, the glass in computer monitors, and the foam in running shoes.
Become a materials scientist and TEST stuff, BREAK stuff, MIX stuff! Discover how strange matter can be!
Here’s a peek into the world of modern materials and the stuff you’ll encounter in the new special exhibition Strange Matter. It’s now open in the MacLean Engineering Gallery at Dynamic Earth – Home of the Big Nickel!
Amorphous Metals
Drop the ball bearings to see which metal plate gives the ball the most bounce. The ball that keeps going, and going, and going, is bouncing on a plate made of Liquidmetal® alloy, a type of amorphous metal and one of the world’s hardest materials! Discover what makes it so hard and how this metal can improve your golf game and help a patient in the operating room.
Ferrofluids
Make a pool of magnetic ferrofluid “dance” and manipulate blobs of it with rare-earth magnets. Discover how these unusual materials are useful in all kinds of places – from the laundry room to the operating room.
Structure and Defects
Are defects always bad? It depends on the properties the materials scientist is trying to create. Play with a sheet of ball bearings and discover how this simple model can be used to create stronger metals.
Touch Tables
Put different materials under the lens of a microscope camera to see how they look magnified larger than life. Play tunes on a wooden xylophone and a xylophone of mixed materials – do similar materials sound the same?
Zoom!
Get a look at materials from the macro (or naked-eye) scale down to the nano scale. Intricate structures are revealed. Find out how scientists “feel” atoms using atomic force microscopes. Be the materials scientist and get down to details.
