Awesome Physics

Magnets can be quite useful, but sometimes they’re just fun to play with. Magnetic Games is back with another series of setups that demonstrate how the vibrations caused by magnetic fields can make music, and how moving one magnet can set off a chain reaction between others.

After seeing a digital simulation of water being poured into a vertical maze and finding its way to the exit, science educator Steve Mould wanted to see if he could replicate the experiment in the real world. It’s interesting to see how maze complexity affects the way the water flows.

A normal bike uses a set of gears to influence the amount of torque sent to its rear wheel. Tom Stanton wanted to see if it was possible to create a bike transmission that uses magnets to turn its wheel and create resistance. Put your thinking caps on for this brainy video that incorporates physics, math, and engineering.

Derek from Veritasium visited the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory to check out the strongest magnet on Earth. With a rating of 45 Tesla, it’s 15 times more powerful than an MRI machine. Along the way, you’ll learn about the strange ways that eddy currents affect objects in such an intense magnetic field.

A modern pinball machine needs computer circuits, electromechanical components, and a power supply to work. Magnet Tricks shows how it’s possible to build a playable mini pinball machine using only magnets and pyrolytic graphite. It takes advantage of the repulsive forces between the two to bounce a washer around its playfield.

Mehdi Sadaghdar was jealous of the views of an obviously fake video showing a magnetically-powered water cannon, so he decided to try and create something real that would approximate the same effect. Naturally, his experiments involved playing with dangerous electrical currents. Get ready to lower your expectations, folks.

What’s more fun than playing with powerful neodymium magnets? Adding high voltage electricity, that’s what! Magnetic Games shows us some of the fascinating kinds of plasma arcs that form as 20,000 volts are applied to different shapes, sizes, and arrangements of magnets.

Geckos can climb up smooth surfaces and even walk upside-down, thanks to the microscopic structures that have evolved on their skin. Derek from Veritasium met with Stanford mechanical engineering professor Mark Cutkosky to learn about synthetic materials he’s developed which can mimic the capabilities of gecko skin.

ExtenPro is back with another entertaining BeamNG.Drive video. This time, they used the vehicle physics simulator to attach wheels to steel shipping containers, then rolled them downhill into oncoming traffic. The carnage is spectacular, though we thought for a moment that Dodge Viper would escape unharmed.

We’ve witnessed first-hand how car companies test the suspension setups on new vehicles. They also use computer simulations with realistic physics models. This video from ExtenPro shows how various vehicle suspensions might handle on a punishing course they set up in the vehicle simulation game BeamNG drive.

Common sense tells us that if you drop a rubber ball, it will never bounce higher than you dropped it from unless you add energy by throwing it. But at first glance, the ball that The Action Lab shows in this clip defies the laws of physics. Of course, it doesn’t really, but it’s a neat trick.

If you place a billiard ball on a spinning turntable, you’d think it would quickly slide off its edge. But as science educator Steve Mould shows us, the ball hangs on much longer than you’d expect. The physics at work here are truly fascinating, especially given how other objects leave the surface so quickly.

For his latest experiment, rocket scientist and entertainer Mark Rober teamed up with Joe Barnard of BPS Space to launch an egg into space to see if they could catch it safely a mattress when it dropped back to earth. But the project proved far more challenging than they thought and required huge amounts of trial and error.

Those fancy Dyson fans are called “bladeless,” but they really just hide their fan blades in the base. Integza wanted to see if it would be possible to build a fan that actually has no blades. His theory was that he could harness and direct the ionic wind created by high-voltage electricity.

Magnets have some very interesting physical properties. Magnetic Games previously showed us how they can make each other vibrate. They’re back with three more minutes of neodymium magnets interacting with each other’s fields. That separator machine that works like a paper cutter is a cool idea.

Could a penny dropped from a skyscraper kill someone? Derek Muller from Veritasium teamed up with Adam Savage to revisit this urban myth by dropping a bucketful of pennies on Muller from a helicopter. After surviving the experiment, he explains how gravity and air resistance affect the terminal velocity of objects.

Mark Rober likes to use his engineering skills to help the little guy get a fair shake. After showing us how to improve our chances at carnival games, he built a series of portable devices that help him cheat and score the most at skill-based arcade games, and also shows us which ones are complete scams.

Places… numbers… the future… all of these things seem limitless, but are they? This documentary explores the nature of infinity through interviews with prominent mathematicians, physicists, and cosmologists. Is the universe genuinely boundless, or is that just human wishful thinking? Drops 9.26.22 on Netflix.

The idea that our bodies make more heat than the sun seems outlandish. In this video from minutephysics and XKCD, we learn how – going strictly by volume – a human radiates more heat than an equivalent amount of the sun. You’ll also find out what might happen if planets were made out of their corresponding element.

It’s pretty easy to toss something into a spinning fan and watch it get smashed. But how feasible is it to send an object flying through multiple fan blades and have it emerge from the other end? Leave it to the guys from How Ridiculous to find out.

The idea of a portal that leads to another place is science fiction at this point, so any analysis of portal physics is strictly theoretical. But we still enjoyed MinutePhysics’ exploration of the what might happen if one portal passed through another. They need to try something like this on Rick and Morty.

Engineers need to simulate earthquakes to make buildings and other structures safer. Tom Scott headed to the University of Texas to check out the T-Rex, a mobile test rig that can produce massive vibrations in the ground. Combined with sensors, it can measure the stiffness of soil thousands of feet beneath the surface without digging.

If you spin a fluid-filled vessel fast enough, you can get the liquid to form a vortex. Brick Technology wanted to see if they could produce such an effect using LEGO mechanisms, so they created a series of machines to experiment with fluid dynamics. The one at the end is impressively stable for how fast it spins.