A Hovering Magnet Attracts Enthusiasm of Students at West L.A. College
OK, it’s not a swami hovering over the hoi polloi , but levitation is levitation. Even in a junior college. Especially in a junior college, where the kids are given too little credit as it is.
This one was for extra credit, and what hovered was not a holy man but a bar magnet; not 20 feet in the air but an eighth of an inch or so. Still, as chemistry professor Irv Tannenbaum says, “No matter how you arrive at it, levitation is spectacular.”
It started last semester at West Los Angeles College. Danielle Watkins, Chris Spann and Mike Wood, students in Tannenbaum’s chem class, got to wondering about superconductivity, the phenomenon by which electricity passes through a solid without resistance. It used to require downright nippy temperatures (near absolute zero, or minus-459 Fahrenheit) but progress has set a torrid pace.
If the students could put together a superconducting compound, they reasoned, they could demonstrate it by actually suspending a magnet in the air above it. Indeed, the tiny magnet did levitate. It’s a question of magnetic force fields. (It’s called the Meissner Effect; so buy a book.)
“We’re not going to win a Nobel Prize,” the professor says. “Somebody already has. But it was intriguing. The kids worked weekends, nights, and came up with a mix of yttrium, barium, copper oxide. We borrowed equipment from UCLA to make the compound. Then we had our own plant press a pellet and poured liquid nitrogen on it--retail, it costs about the same as milk--to lower the temperature to 77 Kelvin (about minus-352 Fahrenheit).
“It’s one thing to study this stuff, but when you do it, you actually make something levitate, it’s a genuine Gee Whiz.”
Gee Whiz, too, for Tannenbaum, who manages to levitate the spirits of his classes with minimum gear but maximum enthusiasm. “I love it, teaching here,” he says. “Go out there, get these kids turned on. What’s not to love?”
Big Impressions by a Painter From a Tiny Island
The mail comes three times a year, tucked into a metal drum dropped off the fantail of a passing freighter. The store--the only one--is open for an hour on Mondays, another hour on Thursdays. At the schoolhouse, Morse Code and semaphore are required subjects for the 14 pupils. There’s no meat to be had unless one has an uncommon urge for wild goat. But the people on the spit of land in the South Seas known as Pitcairn Island, Bryan Moon says, are “the healthiest and happiest I’ve ever met.”
Moon, a former airline vice president who “painted my way out,” is appearing at local galleries--Los Angeles, Glendale, San Diego--signing prints of his painting ($300 a pop) of the H.M.S. Bounty approaching Pitcairn, and spinning yarns about the tiny island colonized by mutineer Fletcher Christian 200 years ago. The limited-edition prints, “hand-carried” to and from the island by sailboat, are franked with Pitcairn stamps, signed by descendants of the mutineers and they even include a slice of metal from the ballast of the Bounty.
“There are only 46 people left on Pitcairn,” he says, “but they live in perfect harmony. For the 10 days I was there, I rarely saw them stop joking and smiling, whether at work or play. Of course, the air is fabulous, and the diet unbeatable: fish, vegetables, fruit, all grown or caught there. No crime. They’re surpassingly cooperative, well, they have to be, with the nearest port (Tahiti) 1,300 miles away. Irma Christian, for example, is schoolteacher, radio-telegraph operator and serves on the island council.”
What’s more, no smoking on Pitcairn, and no drinking--”Well, the odd bottle does surface now and then,” Moon says. “They’re all Seventh-Day Adventists, you see. And they celebrate the sabbath on Saturday. That’s Fletcher Christian’s fault: He forgot to factor in the International Dateline.”
World’s a Stage for Shakespeare Scholar
We caught up with him fresh out of the Harvard School pool in Studio City and decided on the spot that a Shakespeare scholar who plays water polo can’t be all bad.
Besides, Michael Badger’s voice still is changing. Endearing fissures endow his performance of Richard III with a querulous timbre not even Olivier could match. “His voice really is in that in-between stage,” says Trudy Dunne, head of the L. A. branch of the English-Speaking Union, “but he’s pretty amazing--funny too.”
Badger, 15, had just won the branch’s first Shakespeare Recitation Competition. This weekend he’s in New York for the nationals, with finals on the Bard’s birthday. (Shakespeare would be 425 today.)
“We had to recite a monologue and a sonnet and give a cold reading chosen by the jury,” which included Lynn Redgrave and Michael York, among others, said Badger before heading East. “I chose ‘Now is the winter of our discontent. . . .’ Richard is complex, villainous, killing everybody to get to the throne. Such a conniver! He’s always been a favorite.”
Always? “Well, since I was 12 or 13, going to Trinity School in New York and studying Shakespeare. ‘Richard’ is like a mystery book, something I might have read on my own, not even in school. Sure, I have to stop to look up words, but I genuinely like Shakespeare. And performing.”
As Richard, “Michael came across very dramatically,” Dunne said, “all hunched over and hissing. Really quite colorful.”
Badger credits the color to his Harvard School English teacher--Irish-born Caitlin Epstein--and a private acting teacher, Lisa Loving. “Miss Loving has helped me a lot,” he said, “with Richard especially. She taught me character techniques and how to say different words. Like ‘When you say lascivious, say it lasciviously. ‘ “
