Newly Relisted: Planck Constant Amethyst Bangle

Happy Monday! For most people, Monday means a return to the work or study grind, but for me Monday is the beginning of my weekend. I have classes on Wednesdays and Thursdays, then tutoring over the weekend. Friday usually gets sucked up into tutoring prep, so I try to leave Mondays as low-key days.

All of this is to say: Monday's a good day to do blog and Etsy stuff. Here's my next just-relisted piece of SciArt:

Planck Constant bracelet in amethyst and fluorite.

Physics jewelry in action! Also: I have teeny-tiny nail beds. 

I love love love making things out of memory wire, which makes me the beading equivalent of a filthy casual I suppose, but sometimes you just want to put some beads together and not fuss with clasps and crimps. I also love wearing memory wire because it's easy to get off and on but surprisingly secure. I've never had a memory wire bracelet just suddenly come undone and fall off out of the blue. 

The number in this piece is the Planck constant, a proportionality constant that describes the relationship between the energy of a particle and the frequency of its associated electromagnetic wave. 

More specifically, it's a physical constant that can be measured in a number of different ways; the value I used here is given in Joule-seconds. This is mostly because I'm more familiar with Joules than electronvolts. Physical constants are also notoriously tricky to measure, so every once in a while their values are recalculated and recalibrated. The value I used in this bracelet is from the 2010 CODATA value, but CODATA values were recalculated in 2014, which makes this little piece of wearable nerdery a bit out of date.

The round beads are both amethyst; the large rectangular beads are fluorite. Those are all mostly purple but you can see flecks of green in them here and there.

You can peep over in my STEM-my Etsy for more details on this guy. Don't forget to check out the #SciArt hashtag on Twitter for some other science-inspired art!