Awesome Physics

Blowing and popping soap bubbles is fun – other than the slippery mess left on the floor afterward. The Slow Mo Guys had some fun making soap bubbles so big that a human can stand inside of it. The 50,000 fps slow-motion footage gives us a unique perspective on what it looks like as each bubble bursts.

It’s pretty easy to get a LEGO wheel spinning fast with a motor, but what about with human power? The Brick Experiment Channel set up a LEGO flywheel and gear mechanism which he proceeded to spin using only his fingers and a piece of string. He measured the rotations using a laser and a marker to calculate its speed.

We’ve previously seen how gravity might affect a ball being dropped on different planets, as well as the sun and the moon. Now see what might happen if the same experiment were conducted with a stack of lumber dropped onto a car, courtesy of the automotive physics simulator BeamNG.

When you place a marble at the bottom of a ramp it shouldn’t roll uphill, right? Well in this tricky video from Things Made of Cardboard, they made it look like it’s possible. See if you can figure out how they did it before the end of the video.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could walk on water? With a lot of trial and error, JLaservideo designed and fabricated a special pair of shoes that let him stroll above the surface. They use powerful electric motors and propellers to push the wearer up out of the water. Maintaining balance is clearly the trickiest part.

Howdy, folks! It’s science time! Veritasium explains how gravity isn’t a force according to the General Theory of Relativity. He then demonstrates how the way we are moving through space-time while standing on Earth isn’t really any different from what an astronaut experiences as their rocket accelerates through space.

Magnetic Games presents another wildly satisfying video. This time, he uses a bunch of spherical and tubular magnets to create a series of gradually more complex spinning kinetic sculptures. It’s equal parts ASMR, physics experiment, and visual fun.

After creating a vacuum inside of a glass jar using a microwave, the Hydraulic Press Channel submerged and crushed it with their 40-ton press. At first glance, it looks like any other glass being shattered, but you can really see the water being sucked into the vacuum during the implosion on the high-speed playback.

Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall envisions what might happen if the Moon came out of its orbit and crashed into the Earth. Kurzegesagt takes a more scientific approach, and explains what might happen if the moon gradually got closer to the Earth, and the big problems we’d experience long before the Moon ever got here.

DoodleChaos loves to create visualizations of music. While they usually use programs like Minecraft, Planet Coaster, and Line Rider, they made this video with a custom Unity program that reads MIDI files and drops an object each time a key is pressed. As the music progresses, the density of the falling Tetrominoes goes insane.

We’re fascinated by this short video of a star-shaped bubble wand as the frigid air hits it and causes ice crystals to form. We love how the crystals swirl to life across the filmy surface and the shapes they create in the warm orange glow of sunset.

GazR’s Extreme Brick Machines built this unique LEGO Technic vehicle that stores energy in a flywheel. A rig consisting of 21 Powered-Up L motors and six Smart Hubs transfers power to the flywheel, then the car can continue driving on its own. It doesn’t go very far but has enough torque to climb a hill.

Cooling yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) to -180°C creates a superconductor that levitates when placed in a magnetic field. Magnetic Games demonstrates the strange physics at play using powerful neodymium magnets for the supercooled puck to interact with. Turn captions on for more details.

After watching one of Smarter Every Days‘ videos about the unique beauty of laminar flow, Derek Muller of Veritasium wanted to explore a much trickier kind of physics. When air, fluids, and gases experience turbulence, their chaos may be hard to explain and model, but it’s pretty amazing stuff when you dive in deep.

It’s not hard to blow out a candle, so the idea of an app that does it for you seems rather silly. Still, it’s a neat party trick. The Action Lab takes a look at the iOS app Blower and explains how it uses sound pressure to work its magic.

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.

A bicycle is a fairly simple vehicle, but the physics involved in keeping it from falling over are more complex than you might think. But as Veritasium demonstrates, get one critical mechanism wrong, and you end up with a bike that’s nearly impossible to keep upright – especially when turning.

BeamNG.drive is known for its ability to simulate vehicle dynamics and crashes with impressive accuracy. In addition to weather conditions, it can also replicate gravitational forces. In this clip from The Action Lab, he shows off what might happen if you tried to drive a pickup truck on the Moon, Jupiter, and even the Sun.

TED-Ed’s Andrew Zimmerman Jones provides a brief overview of the different ways in which physicists theorize how time and space relate, and ponders the question that time may not be a fundamental property of the universe, and only exists in our collective minds.

A while back, Smarter Every Day showed off an air cannon that can launch a baseball at speeds over 1000 mph. This time, they used the cannon to observe the physics at work as the ball leaves the cannon and is obliterated. Stick around for some amazing 36,000 fps slow-motion footage of exploding sprinkles and mayonnaise.

A Euler’s Disk is a plaything that illustrates the physics at work between a spinning, rolling disc, and stationary surface. Beyond the Press supersized the experiment by machining medium- and giant-size versions of the toy. Both are incredibly loud as they spin, and you wouldn’t want to put your hand underneath the bigger one.

You might think of the passage of time as something that moves in a particular direction – from left to right, front to back, or clockwise around a dial. As MinuteEarth explains, there’s no uniform way of looking at the direction of time, and how humans even represent it differently based on the way their language is written.

A splashing droplet of liquid may seem inconsequential when viewed in real-time, but slow that down to 7000 frames per second, and each frame becomes a work of art. Jens Heidler of Another Perspective demonstrates with a montage of hypnotic images he shot using a Photron Fastcam Nova S16 high-speed camera.