The Electronic Mind of Norman Scheinberg

Forrest M. Mims III

The annual meetings of the Society for Citizen Scientists attract an audience that can only be described as eclectic. At no other meeting will one encounter men and women whose passion about science covers such a wide range of topics.

The Fourth Citizen Science Conference again confirmed this observation, and Prof. Norman Scheinberg demonstrated all that is best about the amateur science community.

If you know Dr. Scheinberg, you know he is not an amateur scientist in the traditional use of the phrase. He is a professor of electrical engineering at the City College of New York, and he has written many papers for peer-reviewed journals.

So why was Dr. Scheinberg at the SAS meeting? Have a look at Fig. 1 and you will see one of the reasons. This high-voltage demonstration he conducted during the poster session at the recent conference couldn't be missed, especially because of the loud sound that accompanied the discharges. This image nicely captures the electronic mind of Norman Scheinberg.

The photograph was made with a Casio EX-Z850 8-megapixel digital camera at f/4 and 1/10 second. The slow exposure time was selected to capture a series of the arc discharges.

You can find out more about Dr. Scheinberg's demonstrations in coverage of the poster session elsewhere in this edition of The Citizen Scientist.

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