When I was an undergrad, we were so poor, not only did we have broken equipment, not only did the professor beat us to within an inch of our lives if we were more than 1% in systematic error from theory, and we were grateful for it, not only did we have to do write-ups 25 hours a day without pen or paper, as well as attend lectures at the bottom of the nuclear pond from 6am to midnight with no breaks for lunch, it goes without saying naked, but we were also so poor we didn’t even have water, so we had to put out fires by sitting on them. And there were fires all the time, the nuclear reactor blew up at least twice a week. When I say half my class didn’t graduate I don’t mean they were too stupid – they simply burned their asses off doing physics. But we loved it, even dead. Oh God I miss those days. The smell of radiation burns in the dorms, which were just shacks built on the river, without roofs or a floor, the camaraderie of all of us huddled for warmth in a winter storm while solving the Einstein Field Equations in our heads, colloquium from Thursday at 5 until Monday at 6, outside in the dark — it was dark 24/7 in those days, and minus 350 Kelvin in the summer — don’t talk to me about absolute zero, that’s a new thing pandering to the modern kids – where we had to not only give the talk but also build an electric baton, beat our fellow students with it if they fell asleep, and at the same time calculate the impulse of the baton, estimate the blood loss in the brain from the blow, measure the blood loss by open skull surgery, without anesthetic of course, using a hatchet made from a dead horse, and then the dead student had to show that the electric dipole moment of the baton was relativistically conserved under the proper Lorentz transform, in order to be readmitted to the program. All I might add, without food or coffee. We were poor but we were happy. Those were the days. We did real Physics. The kids today are soft. The actually get a bed! They actually have food to eat. The lab equipment works and they have instructions and instructors! If we had had those luxuries we never would have done any physics! Its no wonder the world is falling apart!

Then again, my students have gotten results very close to theory using nothing more complicated than stop watches. And, I get to give history lessons as they’re working since they’re essentially replicating the work of Galileo and other scientists who had to use their pulse as a timer.

Maintaining lab equipment for teaching physics is expensive, annoying, frustrating, and essential for understanding that physics is a science. People who keep the real thing running are doing very important work.

But I would like to say anybody interested in old scientific instruments should see this exhibit at Harvard:

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/chsi-exhibitions.html

They have finally gotten their collection out of the basement and into a nice room on the ground floor of the science building.

I saw it last week, very enjoyable.

Ah, the one in your picture is a coffee machine. I mean, it is a still (distiler?) appartatus able to work at low presure, isnt it? In Zaragoza they use the low pressure trick to be able to extract the scent of a coffee cup by only lightly heating.