Stories tagged physics
Professor Julius Sumner Miller educated and entertained generations of Australians on television with his TV series called "Why is it so?"
Now you too can watch some "enchanting experiments" with the good professor! Both dialup or broadband connections available (click the link above for dozens of episodes).
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Standing wave on 2D surface
Courtesy Oleg_AlexandrovThe mixture of corn starch and water literally stands up in the video below because of standing waves. If you want to try this, place a mixture of corn starch and water on cookie sheet. Hold the cookie sheet down over a bass speaker with some of your fingers. The speaker should be playing music with low frequencies. By varying the distance an position of your fingers you can alter the standing wave patterns within the cookie sheet.
It is the season to consider the fine points of our national pastime. Left-handers have the upper hand, in many ways. Here is the story:
In horse racing, a jockey has to be atop the horse at the finish line to count as an official finisher. But what about BMX bike racing? Check out this video. Oh yeah, there's some science attached to this: momentum, conservation of energy, balance. But it's just plain fun to watch.
BBC documentary on You Tube explaining quantum mechanics and the nature of electrons.
Click here to view to a Flash animation of a clever song that runs through all the elements of the periodic table that existed in the late 1950s.
Afterwards, see if you can guess how many more elements have been added since. And can you name them? Personally, I can't get the dang song out of my head.
But now watch this little four-year-old showboat put you to shame.
I'm so embarrassed.
Garrett Lisi, a 39-year-old surfer, hiking guide and construction worker (with a PhD in theoretical physics), believes he may have solved the biggest problem in all of science – how are all the particles of matter and forces of nature related to one another? Scientists since Einstein have been trying to figure it out, with little success. (The current theory involves outrageously tiny “strings” vibrating in 11-dimensional space. The mathematics, they say, is beautiful, but it cannot be tested or verified.) Lisi’s breakthrough came when he noticed that the formulas that describe something called the E8 pattern -- a complex, geometrical design with 248 points – also describe many of the fundamental forces and particles. His theory is that nature follows the same formulas as E8, and that the figure can be used to predict particles that have not yet been discovered. If he's right, he will have finally shown that everything in the universe is related, and basically just different manifestations of the same essence.
Rad, dude.
Isaac Newton: Public domain image.Do you consider yourself well-versed in scientific thought? Can you recite all three of Newton’s Laws of Motion? In Latin? Are you one of those people who can prove a direct link between Albert Einstein’s hairdo and the Chaos theory? Oh, yeah? Well, how about you try to figure out these problems smart guy:
1) You fall into a swiftly moving river and are in need of a floatation device. You see a life preserver bobbing three yards downstream of you and another one three yards behind you. Which preserver should you swim toward?
2) A bullet is fired into one end of a spiral tube. When it comes out of the other end (forgetting here about the effects of gravity) will the bullet follow a trajectory that
(a) is a straight line.
(b) begins as a slight curve in the same direction as the spiral tube before gradually straightening out.
(c) begins as a slight curve in the opposite direction of the tube before straightening out?
3) A plane flying into a headwind will have a lower speed, relative to the ground, than it would if it were flying through still air, while a plane traveling with the benefit of a brisk tailwind will have a comparatively greater ground speed. But what about a plane flying through a 90-degree crosswind, a breeze that is buffeting its body side-on? Will its ground speed be higher, lower, or no different than it would be in calm skies?
Okay, how do you think you did? Do you think you did better than a ninth-grader? Probably not if he or she attends the Academy of Science in Loudoun County, Virginia. These are exactly the kinds of questions that Faye Cascio’s physics class has to tackle there.
And not only can her ninth-grade students solve these kinds of problems in Newtonian mechanics with flying colors, but they can explain the reasoning behind their solutions. If you’re like me, you guessed on one or two of them, but in Ms. Cascio’s class no one gets away with such nonsense. She insists that her students understand what they’re explaining.
“It’s called dipsticking,” Cascio said. “It’s really important to make sure the kids are picking this information up, and so I ask, Is this clear to you? Do you really understand it? and I won’t go on until I get a positive, satisfying answer.”
Cascio’s students are expected to learn to think like scientists and start doing experiments from the get-go. And they are required to design the experiments themselves, and even wear cool, white lab coats while doing so.
This could be good news for the perceived state of science education in our country, which for various reasons has been rather dismal. American students have not fared well in international science and math competitions as of late.
But the trend seems to be swinging in the opposite direction, according to the American Institute of Physics. Special programs in math and science for “gifted and talented” students are increasing. This year the percentage of high school students enrolled in physics classes is at an all-time high, and bachelor’s degrees in the subject have increased more than 30 percent in the last seven years.
This is really good news for science education, and it will be interesting to see how things pan out in future competitions.
But in the meantime, how about those three physics problem? How well do you think you did? Post your answers as a comment, and we'll see how everyone does before I post the correct answers. By the way, I missed them all. I’m so ashamed.
Action analysis: The new TV show Sport Science breaks down the action on the fields and courts into the scientific principles at play. It also monitors the athletes' bodies to see what they're doing inside to do all those amazing things on the outside. The Fox Sport Net show will air at various times in various regions beginning Sunday, Sept. 30.We’ve had more than our share of interesting blog entries here about the intersection of science and sports. Fox Sports Net must have been reading some of them, because this weekend it launches a 13-week series of shows called “Sport Science.” They’ll appear at varying dates and times on the regional carriers of the sports network.
It’s part science, part reality TV and part gym rat habitat. For the show, producers used an airport hangar in southern California as a lab to test the science behind the various amazing feats that happen in various sports.
The action of a 50-yard touchdown pass, a three-point basket shot up under time pressure and a hockey wrist shot, among many other things, were all filmed to be broken down scientifically and explained.
Along with the physics at play in a particular sports activity, athletes performing the actions have their bodies hooked up to monitors to gauge the biological actions taking place inside their body as they exert themselves.
I’ve been trying to click around the net to see when the show will appear in the Twin Cities, and have had no luck. I guess you’ll need to keep your eyes open for promos. Producers of the show also say that they anticipate having episodes of the show ready for DVD distribution somewhere down the line.
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