I'm gonna get an hourglass and throw away the sand. Then I'll fill the glass with grains that are more optically active. The idea is to illuminate these grains to produce a decorative effect. One way to light up the grains would be to shine a beam of light at a right angle to the stream of falling grains probably just below the constriction in the glass. If ballotini (tiny glass spheres) are used, this should give a lower and upper portion (short arcs) of a "rainbow." If the glass is modified to produce a wider stream of ballotini, like a screen, a full circle rainbow should be produced on a nearby wall when a white light is shined at a right angle to the plane of the screen. Then I want to try optical grade quartz grains. Will it be pretty? Ballotini coated in gold, silver, copper, and other metals are available. What would that be like? How 'bout garnet as used in "sand" blasting. The list is long. The other way I want to illuminate the grains in the glass is by constructing an enclosed box for a light under the glass. This would introduce light up through a growing and moving pile of grains. I'm particularly interested in using ultraviolet light to illuminate mineral grains of something like calcite. This would look like white sand until you turned the UV light on. Then the grains would fluoresce bright pink. Again there are many fluorescent minerals, and fluorescent ballotini are also available. The idea is to produce an atractive novelty to satisfy my personel curiosity about what light does when refracted/ reflected/dispersed by moving grains. I guess this is a kind of clock. Might even be educational as well as pretty. Whadaya think?
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I recently visited the aquarium in Boston, and they've got this tiny waterfall with a strobe light attached. The flow of water is timed with the strobe so that the individual water droplets seem to be moving upward. Your idea reminded me of this, and how cool it'd be to have something like that in a "home version". I like the idea of using this as a learning tool about the properties of light. You could make the ends of the hourglass open and close, so the material inside could easily be changed/blended.
If you could use high intensity LEDs to illuminate your stream, then a microcomputer could be programmed to give you different effects. Like a strobe that changes colors and the pulse rate. Being able to choose whatever color you want (RGB). Having a small microphone provide input to the microprocessor to do a fourier transform and provide colors profiled to the ambient sounds. Once you have the microprocessor hooked in, your imagination can come to life.