Ian Bushfield weighs paper with his lasers

Café Scientifique Vancouver (Canada) will be holding a meeting on the subject of lasers and weighing paper at The Railway Club on the 2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. (at Seymour St.) next Tuesday, from the Mar. 19, 2013 email announcement,

Our next café will happen on Tuesday March 26th, 7:30pm at The Railway Club. Our speaker for the evening will be Ian Bushfield.

The title and abstract for his café is:

“Weighing Paper With Lasers”

Until the 1990s, a narrow band of radiation in the far-infrared had remained largely unexplored. Terahertz radiation’s unique interaction with water molecules and weak interaction with most plastic and fabrics make it an ideal probe for a wide range of applications, from security scanners to death rays. One area of interest is in product testing and quality control. In this talk, Ian Bushfield will describe his masters of physics work in developing a technique to use terahertz radiation to obtain the thickness, weight, and water content of paper, for application in paper manufacturing. These non-contact sensors offer industry a way to improve accuracy and production speed by replacing sensors that rely on physical contact with paper reams. This work was supported by the NSERC Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship, SFU, and the Honeywell Vancouver Centre for Excellence.

We hope to see you there!

Ian Bushfield has his own website,

I am the executive director of the British Columbia Humanist Association and a passionate advocate for science outreach and education. I have recently completed an MSc in Physics and have a BSc in Engineering Physics. I have worked as a research assistant and as a science summer camp instructor.

I gather Bushfield will be focusing on the work he did for his master’s thesis (from Bushfield’s résumé page),

Master of Science in Physics, Simon Fraser University 2011

Given the description for his talk, I don’t imagine Bushfield will be discussing his interest in humanism although I’m sure he’ll be open to questions. I’ve found the meetings at the Railway Club to be pleasantly fueled by beer, burgers, and conversation about science and any other topics attendees care to raise. (Bushfield was last mentioned here in my Feb. 8, 2013 posting about Charles Darwin Day and the February 2013 Café Scientifique meeting.)

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