Alright, I’ll tip my hand. I’ve seen similar things like these used before. They are forms for concrete spherical bollards.
They are bolted together to ensure the concrete remains on the inside (keeping the weight of the material inside, cause concrete is heavy), yet is bolted together to facilitate removal of the forms. That bracket on the left? It’s used to pump in concrete.
You unbolt the form, then polish up the concrete ball to look all shiny and smooth.
I’ll bet Nitro has seen concrete bollards around his campus, and/or has a civil engineering program or architectural one.
Tripler
Rest assured, those things are damned expensive, so I’ll be over shortly to pick it up.
I’m not too sure about this. Lessee: It looks insanely overbuilt for that purpose. Why would you need hundreds of tiles when ten segments would get you pretty close? Concrete shifts, bulges and dips as it cures, too, doesn’t it? And no reason to add portholes or make the pipe at left from many discrete sections. No reason to make it out of what does appear to be an exotic material. And it doesn’t seem strong enough to hold what must be a huge load of concrete.
I don’t buy it.
If you look at the pipe that’s attached to the backside, it’s curved. There would be no reason to do that for a mold. Also, there are two right-angle ports on that pipe - why would those be there? And, why have the additional two flanges on the ball?
No, this is a chamber for some type of Physics or Chemistry experiment - we just need to figure out the details.
I don’t think it’s a concrete mold. Good guess, but there would be absolutely no reason to construct it like this - it would be a huge, clunky mess on the outside and composed of likely no more than eight segments. Also (I drove by it again today) there are three of the curved pipes, in parallel - you can just barely see the second in the photo. I can’t imagine any functional need for three such crossed-and-capped pipes. I am leaning towards “art” even though the first suggestions to that effect seemed absurd. It’s too pretty and too lacking in obvious purpose or function to be anything else.
But I will be emailing a few department heads to see what I can see.
Do the curved pipes connect again in the back where we can’t see? Are they also capped like the one we see, or open?
A reason I could see for having so many small pieces is that it gives you the ability to position the ports in many different positions. Every 9 degrees along the equator, and similarly fine adjustment (with differently shaped port pieces) in the polar direction. You could make measurements at a large number of positions.
So if we don’t know what it is, what can we do to find out?
Do you have access to anything that can identify what it’s made of? X-Ray Fluorescence? Bring a magnet to see if it’s magnetic? I think taking a picture of the inside to see if it’s 1 compartment or several compartments, or examining the inside for residue will shed some light. You need a flash though.
Extensive Google image searching for pretty much every permutation of:
sphere, vacuum, chamber, vessel, mould, segments, bolted, metal, sectional, configurable
does not return any results for anything very similar. So (mostly to recap - I realise I’m reiterating things I and others have said above):
The thing definitely has the look of a vacuum chamber (it’s just that vacuum chambers normally seem to be cast or welded in fewer, larger pieces)
So it’s been made from many small pieces for a reason (I don’t believe someone would over-engineer something this much by accident) - that reason could be:
[ul]
[li]Limitations of equipment - i.e. no facility for casting or machining large sections[/li][li]To provide flexibility - this could be a proof of concept for some sort of erector/meccano style universal construction kit[/li][li]For visual effect - if it’s a piece of art[/li][li]If it’s a scale model[/li][/ul]
It may be that what I saw in the video was an early neutrino detector. I have been reviewing some of the sixty symbols videos, including the “neutrinos” one, and haven’t found the one I was thinking of.
In the video, they showed the device in its modern situation (a metal vessel about 2.5 metres long, stripped of all its measurement and detection equipment, mounted like a sculpture in a courtyard, standing open to the elements, with some empty beer cans inside IIRC), and also some old black-and-white footage of the device in use.
No wonder I hated early SNL.