The Trip to NIST
National Institute for Standards and Technology...two words…LIQUID NITROGEN!!! This field trip was awesome; our class got to see liquid nitrogen and its effects on all sorts of things. We began our journey by walking around the whole building to get to one place. After we finally got situated with our guide we were taken into a small room to be shown a presentation and taught about certain laws of physics and what NIST itself does. We filled a square container with liquid nitrogen and dropped things like bouncy balls, banana, and a conductor. Once they had been soaking for a half and hour or so we took them out to see the effects. The bouncy ball had turn to rock and wouldn’t bounce anymore, the banana had also turned very hard and could be shattered, the conductor's resistance went way down, so it worked a lot better. This presentation was so captivating that most the class was late back to school.