The Osborne Center for Science and Engineering is home to the departments of Mechanical Engineering, Physics, and Biology.
Osborne is the largest academic building on campus, but there are only six classrooms in the whole building. Most of the space is dedicated to instructional and research labs.
The most distinguishing feature of the building, a three-story tall pendulum commemorates the union of the three subjects taught in Osborne. The mechanical engineering component is an array of magnets at the top that keep the pendulum continuously in motion. The physics aspect is in how the pendulum swings. The motion isn’t controlled, so as the path of the pendulum appears to change over the course of the day, it is actually the Earth that is moving as the pendulum stays in the same position. The Biology portion is represented in the whirlpool. It is set to spin at a resting human heart rate, but if you were to run a mile and put your hands on the metal sensors on the panel, the whirlpool would speed up to match your heart rate. Finally, the center of the whirlpool represents Colorado Springs, and the dots around it are different locations representing the exact distances from Colorado Springs to those locations.
Some of the mechanical engineering facilities housed in Osborne include the campus machine shop, prototyping labs, materials engineering labs, and a wind tunnel just to name a few. Physics facilities include the liquid crystal lab, scanning electron microscope, and Biofrontiers which performs research that joins physics and biology. A mammalogy lab, microbiology labs, and a wide range of biology facilities are also housed in Osborne.
Osborne is the largest academic building on campus, but there are only six classrooms in the whole building. Most of the space is dedicated to instructional and research labs.
The most distinguishing feature of the building, a three-story tall pendulum commemorates the union of the three subjects taught in Osborne. The mechanical engineering component is an array of magnets at the top that keep the pendulum continuously in motion. The physics aspect is in how the pendulum swings. The motion isn’t controlled, so as the path of the pendulum appears to change over the course of the day, it is actually the Earth that is moving as the pendulum stays in the same position. The Biology portion is represented in the whirlpool. It is set to spin at a resting human heart rate, but if you were to run a mile and put your hands on the metal sensors on the panel, the whirlpool would speed up to match your heart rate. Finally, the center of the whirlpool represents Colorado Springs, and the dots around it are different locations representing the exact distances from Colorado Springs to those locations.
Some of the mechanical engineering facilities housed in Osborne include the campus machine shop, prototyping labs, materials engineering labs, and a wind tunnel just to name a few. Physics facilities include the liquid crystal lab, scanning electron microscope, and Biofrontiers which performs research that joins physics and biology. A mammalogy lab, microbiology labs, and a wide range of biology facilities are also housed in Osborne.