5 Nerdy Science Costumes for Halloween

Trick or treat, jack o lanterns, sugar treats and frivolous costumes. 

It is that time of the year again, when people rack their brains out for great Halloween costumes. If you don’t have a costume yet, you’ve obviously got little time to put a cool and easy costume together. But that’s alright; we’ve dug up a few scientific ideas for you this Halloween season.  

Since you are reading this, you have more than casual interest in science. Though it gets harder to balance the love for science in your costume with each passing year, here are five very nerdy science costumes you can carry this frightful Halloween season.
Without further ado, let’s begin! 

  1.    Doppler Effect Named after an Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, it is the change in frequency of a wave for an observer moving relative to its source. For example, imagine the sound a race car makes as it passes by you, whining high pitched and then suddenly lower.  The high pitched whine is caused by the sound waves being compacted and the lower pitched comes after it passes you and is speeding away. Here the waves spread out. The Doppler Effect applies to all types of waves, including water, sound and light. 

2.       Schrödinger’s Cat  

This is a classic example of a feature of quantum physics. The experiment goes like this, place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill the cat. The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and the cat killed. Since that is a mystery, according to quantum law, the cat is both dead and alive, this is called a superposition of states. This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox.

3.     Hubble telescope 

The Hubble Space Telescope is a space telescope that was launched into Earth’s low orbit in 1990 and remains in operation till date. Approximately it is the size of a school bus with a 2.4-meter (7.9 ft) mirror and it is cylindrical.  Hubble has an unobstructed view of the universe due to its UV, visible and infrared spectra. We have used Hubble to observe the most distant stars and galaxies as well as the planets in our solar system.

4.      Radio telescope 

A radio telescope is a form of directional radio antenna used in radio astronomy. These types of antennas are also used in tracking and collecting data from satellites and space probes. 

5.     Rubik's Cube  

Rubik's Cube, also known as the magic cube is a 3-D combination puzzle invented in 1974  by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. Normally the task is to have the same colored tiles on each face. It usually comes in a three rows and three columns format. Here is the math behind it.

Happy Halloween!