2024-01-06 03:45:12
This 2023 marks 30 years since the launch of “Magic Pennies”, an innovative project to awaken scientific curiosity through playing with those metal pieces that are often underestimated in the purse. Its creator, the English researcher Robin Willson, settled in the Argentine province of Chubut and there founded Sciences and Arts Patagonia, a non-profit organization that promotes national and international cooperation.
It all started by chance in 1993, when Robin Willson, a biochemistry researcher and emeritus professor at Brunel University in London, UK, discovered that the British government had begun making copper-clad steel 1p coins instead of copper. make them only of copper, which made them magnetic. Quickly, Willson realized the enormous potential of these pieces in education to foster the interest of adults and children in science through play and experimentation. He called them “magic pennies.”
“Seeing the incredible things that can be done using magnets with these pennies, I realized that they would be a wonderful way to educate and entertain children,” recalled the researcher, one of the “founding fathers” of the study of chemistry and the biology of free radicals, who in 1997, after his retirement, stayed to live in Puerto Madryn, Chubut.
These coins can balance on ordinary objects, spin at high speed in complex geometric patterns without any apparent means of support, and defy gravity in different experiments using magnets. Furthermore, for even more amazement, levitating sculptures of great beauty can be created with them. “There are no stickers and there are no tricks. “It’s just science,” Willson used to insist. “Magic pennies stimulate the basic cycle of science: wonder, curiosity and experimentation as well as artistic creativity,” he said.
Robin Willson with magnetic coins. (Photo: CyTA-Leloir Agency)
These experiments provide a basis for demonstrating, in a completely novel way, the properties of magnetic fields and the geometry of circular packing, concepts relevant to science and engineering in general. The effect is literally magnetic: the kids can’t seem to tear themselves away once they start trying out the “tricks” that can be done with coins: from levitating pyramids to pennies pirouetting on a bridge made from a coat hanger or chains held by a magnet that can rotate at high speed if blown.
“The goal is to get people interested in science and also make them see that it can be fun,” Willson said. “This is not new science, but what these experiments show has even amazed several scientists,” he boasted.
Magic pennies were presented with great success in numerous international venues such as the Edinburgh Science Festival and the British Museum in London. With that drive, Willson founded the “Magic Penny Society”, a charity organization to market them and allocate all proceeds to educational projects. In 1995, with the support of Brunel University, the Institute of Physics and the Royal Institution in London, the first kit containing current magnetic coins, two specially designed ceramic block magnets and the book “Investigating Magnetism” was launched. ”, where novel experiments are described to bring the public closer to the concepts of this physical property. The kits even arrived at the famous Harrods store in London and are now in their fifth edition.
Magnetic coins exist in many other countries, in addition to the United Kingdom, so the proposed experiences quickly expanded to the rest of Europe, Canada, Brazil, China, India, Japan or New Zealand, where their use as an educational tool is available to everyone. It is already a reality. In the case of Argentina, there are more than 70 magnetic coins including the currently used 5 and 10 centavos from 2007 and the 1 peso from 2019. However, countries like the United States only have one and others, such as Australia and Chile, They don’t have any so far.
After settling in Chubut, Willson founded Sciences and Arts Patagonia, a non-profit organization that promotes national and international cooperation between the sciences and the arts for the cultural and socioeconomic benefit of Patagonia, as well as the care of its natural heritage and historical. And he participated in numerous educational projects, exhibitions and conferences in the country.
In 2017 he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the same disease that affects former senator Esteban Bullrich and that British physicist and popularizer Stephen Hawking suffered. However, his passion for the dissemination of science was never interrupted. “It will be for my work with magic pennies that I will be remembered one day,” he used to joke. “As Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine in 1937, said, discovery is seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what no one else has thought. Magic pennies identify with that,” he added.
Willson died in 2022. And 12 colleagues said goodbye to him with a heartfelt obituary in the magazine Redox Experimental Medicine: “With magic pennies he opened the eyes of many children and adolescents to the field of magnetism. His enthusiasm, insight and knowledge will remain with us for many years to come.” (Source: CyTA-Leloir Agency / María Victoria Canullo)
#Magnetic #coins #defy #gravity