17-year-old Pakistani student baffles older scientist at Young Physicists’ Tournament

KARACHI: A Pakistani high school students’ physics paper has managed to stun an older scientist at the International Young Physicists’ Tournament by replicating a physics visualization.

When certain kinds of electrically charged particles travel between a pointy electrode and a flat one, but bump into a puddle of oil along the way, they form an electric honeycomb.

In fact, physicists have known about this phenomenon decades before Muhammad Shaheer Niazi, a 17-year-old high school student from Pakistan met the electric honeycomb. However, in 2016, Niazi, one of the first Pakistani participants in the International Young Physicists’ Tournament replicated the phenomenon and developed photographic evidence of charged ions creating the honeycomb. He published his work in the journal Royal Society Open Science on Wednesday, The NewYork Times reported.

According to the report, an electric honeycomb behaves like a capacitor. In this case, the top electrode is a needle that delivers high voltage to the air just a few centimeters above a thin layer of oil on the other flat, grounded surface electrode.

The thermal images puzzled Alberto T. Pérez Izquierdo, a physicist at the University of Seville in Spain. Neither Izquierdo nor others had previously explored temperature changes on the oil’s surface. Determining the heat’s origin is an interesting question that requires more study, he said, while praising Niazi’s experimental skill.

“I think it’s outstanding for such a young scientist to reproduce these results,” Dr Izquierdo said.

Niazi’s area of interest is researching the mathematics of the electric honeycomb, and in the future, dreams of earning a Nobel Prize in nature — and in the electric honeycomb — as he points out, “nothing wants to do excess work,” but he’s getting started early anyway.