Re:OpenRAMAN – Low-cost, high-performance, open-source Raman...
by alpineidyll3 on Friday May 08, 2020 @09:49PM
(#23121470)
I'm a huge fan of Ben's. In all honesty Zbignew was definitely more talented at munging together homebrew instruments. But who could compete with that old timey eastern bloc science curriculum ;).
I think Ben's misused over there at google. He should be designing the national high school science lab curriculum.
As with his Raman setup, there were some good questions raised in the comments about whether he really saw the effect in question or just got lucky with plausible-appearing artifacts. It's hard to assess validity from the presented results alone, which is unfortunately common in Ben's videos. In the Raman video, he didn't test anything but a single styrofoam cup, and in the mass-spec video he didn't do the obvious baseline run with a clean filament.
Ben's channel is one of those rare ones where the comments are worth reading. You can really see how easy it is for a scientist to inadvertently fool themselves and others. I often end up yelling at the screen, but it's still my favorite YouTube channel of all time.