It’s the holiday season again, and the PhysicsCentral HQ has become a festive wonderland of garlands, snowflakes, and enormous tins of flavored popcorn tempting us at every turn. Today, we’re going to help you get into the holiday spirit with the help of our friends at the Niels Bohr Library, who have cooked up a special set of winter decorations for your home, classroom, and office!
Cutout snowflakes are a fun and crafty way to celebrate the winter months, and are a great hands-on way to learn about symmetry—but why not put a little science twist on your decorations this year?
Inspired by Symmetry Magazine’s holiday 2014 feature, the American Institute of Physics’ graphic design team created a series of cutout snowflake patterns, featuring famous physicists! You can download the patterns here, and others, like the Einstein one, at the link above—make sure to download them, as it seems there were some technical difficulties in creating the .pdfs, so they don’t quite render right when printed from a browser.
If you’ve got a steady hand—and a very sharp x-acto knife—you can ring in the season with…
|
|
| Albert Einstein—and a celebration of crystallography! |
|
|
| Isaac Newton! |
|
|
| and everybody’s favorite—Nikola Tesla! |
Probably my favorite part about these is the fact that, from far away, they mostly just look like regular snowflakes—it’s only once you stop to take a good look that you realize how intricate and awesome they are. With all this festivity, even old Niels Bohr has gotten into the holiday spirit!
|
|
| …although he still looks a little down. Maybe it’s the eyes. |
Can we do something about that? Maybe a little cosmetic adjustment there?
|
|
| Nope, looks like even that didn’t help. |
Happy holidays from PhysicsCentral!