Awesome Physics

If you fill a hose with air or water and don’t hold onto it, it flails around wildly. But why is that? Science educator Steve Mould helps us get a grip on the physics of this flailing behavior. Along the way, he examines air tubes, fire hoses, and wacky waving tube men to see what their chaotic dances have in common.

The idea that an object or a human can spontaneously catch fire or explode seems unlikely. Engineer Xyla Foxlin explores the science behind freak fires that seem to come out of nowhere and explains what makes these fiery phenomena possible. While there are stories of people self-igniting, it seems there’s a rational explanation for each of these fires.

Magnetic interactions can be so satisfying. Take, for instance, this grid of 15 gears that spin when just one of them is turned. MagnetTricks set up this brief physics demonstration using hundreds of magnets arranged into a rainbow of colors. We wonder if there’s a limit to how many gears you could have before the chain reaction stops working.

Balls are essential – and not just the ones between your legs. This educational video from New Mind delves into the physics of ball bearings and how critical they are to modern life. The rolling efficiency of spheres is unparalleled, making them perfect for all sorts of machines and manufacturing applications.

We’ve always assumed that metal is so solid that light couldn’t possibly pass through it. But in this video from The Action Lab, scientist James Orgill shows off germanium, a unique metal that allows infrared light to shine through. We were also surprised to learn that glass blocks infrared light and you can see light through gold leaf.

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest inventors of all time. Among his many ingenious creations was a bridge that could hold itself up without center support structures or permanent attachment points. Sabins Civil Engineering explains the physics behind its interlocking design, its limitations, and potential uses.

xkcd’s What If? Answers the question of what it might be like if astronauts installed a swimming pool on the Moon. Our first thought was that the low gravity would make the water float away, but it turns out that you could swim in it just like on Earth, but with a few awesome bonus features. Time to get to work on this, SpaceX.

The latest episode of xkcd’s What If starts with the titular question. However, they arrive quickly at the conclusion. So they ask a new question: What if we tried more power? And ask it again. And again. And again. We like to imagine a kid submitted the question and is now watching the video with the weight of 8 billion souls on their tiny back.

After making a neodymium magnet float inside a thick copper tube, metalsmith Seth Robinson thought he’d see if he could achieve the same inside of a sphere. What he ended up casting was a cool-looking truncated icosahedron with holes in it so we can see if the magnetic orb inside would levitate. (Thanks, Jesse!)

The “glass half-full/half-empty” idiom offers a simplistic way of comparing pessimistic and optimistic thoughts. xkcd’s What If? explores the physics at work if a glass was literally half-empty and that space was filled with a vacuum. The outcome would be quite different depending on which half was liquid and which half was the vacuum.

Can you open an airplane door mid-flight? Do we really need “airplane mode” on our phones? Derek from Veritasium digs into these and other things that people generally don’t understand about airplanes and air travel. We always assumed planes flew so high to avoid turbulence, but it’s actually to reduce drag and save on fuel consumption.

We all know that the Sun is a terribly hot place. But would you burn to a crisp if you somehow landed on its surface for a nanosecond and then instantly came back to Earth? xkcd’s What If? explores another viewer-submitted hypothetical situation and explains how things would turn out much worse if you transported yourself to the Sun’s core.

Audio geeks know that high-frequency sounds are more directional than low frequencies, but a normal speaker can’t direct sound to a single listener. Linus Tech Tips shows off the Audfly Model B, an unusual speaker that uses an array of ultrasonic drivers to target just one person, then explains how the technology works and some of its limitations.

A few years back, Darren from Beyond Slow Motion teamed up with Kevin from The Backyard Scientist to check out an interesting phenomenon. When you toss an object at a wet section of a mesh screen, it creates a star-shaped shockwave. It’s barely visible to the naked eye, but when you slow it down with a high-speed camera, fascinating details emerge.

James from The Action Lab got his hands on the current world champion for the brightest flashlight, the Imalent MS32. After using the 200,000-lumen flashlight to brighten the night, he put it through a series of experiments, including aiming it through a magnifying lens to see if that could concentrate its beam into a death ray.

If you try squeezing a sealed syringe full of water, it can’t be compressed. But if you leave the Earth’s surface and start heading toward its core, things get strange. Vox offers a brief explanation of the unusual ways that matter behaves in the extreme pressures at the core of a planet or star and the laser tech that’s helping researchers replicate these conditions.