Awesome Pendulums

When you apply a curve to a mirror, it distorts the image it reflects. In these two videos, Dr. Boyd F. Edwards shows some of the strange visual effects that happen when an object is placed in front of a large concave mirror. Objects can appear upright, inverted, magnified, or minified depending on their distance relative to the mirror’s focal point.

Artist Cole Newman uses the power of physics to make large-format paintings. He starts by swinging a can of paint over a moving canvas. Different geometric patterns emerge depending on the velocity and angle of both the can and the canvas. The process does make quite a mess on the floor, but the result is worth it.

An ordinary ping pong table has a simple green or black finish. After getting his hands on a beat up old ping pong table, builder John Malecki and his co-workers reinforced and refinished it, then gave it a sweet surface design – bright geometric patterns created by swinging paint cans from a paracord rope.

Science guy NightHawkInLight takes a popular pendulum physics demonstration and amps it up. He starts out with a large pendulum made from metal nuts and varying lengths of strings for the bright shots, then covers them with tape and fluorescent paint to make them glow brightly under UV light.

We’ve seen some pretty cool pendulum wave demonstrations before, but never one at this scale. Back in 2012, Appalachian State University teacher Jeff Goodman built this oversize physics demo rig using 16 bowling balls, and a series of chimes which play sounds as the balls brush across.

Looking for a cool demo to show off your fancy new HDR display? Look no further than this CGI video from self-proclaimed “GPU melter” lotsalote, in which a set of brightly-illuminated pendulums swing back and forth against a dark background. The 4K 60p footage really pops off the screen with its high contrast imagery.