5 Fun Physics Phenomena

Five cool physics tricks, but how do they work?
Leave your ideas in the comments below or subscribe for the answers next week.

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The Cane Balance:
Slide your fingers in from the ends of a horizontal cane to find its centre of mass.

Shot and Edited by Pierce Cook at the YouTube Space LA.

[BinkieMcFartnuggets]

The hardest part of that first trick is wrestling a cane away from an old lady at the park. They're deceptively strong.

[buzinaocara]

1: You squeezed the center of mass with your fingers
2: You have the bigger (thus heavier) apps on one of the sides of your homescreen, it has more Kb on one side than the other. Kb: (KILO bytes)
3: Water wants to be drunk, so it naturally goes toward the cup.
4: Same as 3, the cheerio has addapted through evolution to go towards metal, because humans sometimes have on their teeth thanks to drills and braces. Also, it things your magner might be a spoon.
5: You killed the poor bag, it went to heaven.

[opencabinets]

"How does this work?"
hmm I don't know why don't you tell m-
"Number two!"

[kaiserking]

1. broke my grandmothers kane
2. broke my phone
3. clogged the drain
4. made my baby choke
5. set my house on fire

great party

[yoshyoka]

1. The fingers receive a different amount of friction according to how the weight is umbalanced. 2. Unequal weight distributon of components inside the phone combined with the longer distance and higher deviation to the center of mass of these to the center of gravity along this axix. 3. Dipoli-dipole interacitons in the water stream as you turn the molecules 4. Cereals contain iron. 5. The heat creates a small adiabatic thermal which is trong enough to lift a few filaments at the end (same reasons why leaves fly over a fire or why gliders can gain height.

[jarrettwattenburger]

This is how they work:
#1 Earthbending
#2 Airbending
#3 Waterbending
#4 Waterbending
#5 Firebending

[isgdre]

1) Heaver end has more friction.
2) Internals of the phone doesn't have equally spaced out mass.  Phone wobbles around other axis too, just incredibly slight.
3) My wag would be bernoulli effect.
4) Your magnet one only works with cereals that contain iron (most of them).
5) The upward column of air created by the heat generated at some point becomes stronger then the remaining weight of the tea bag.

[circli]

My take... Probably messed some up...

1. The cane gets stabilized by the fact that the lighter side of the cane gets less friction form Your finger than the heavier side, so that finger moves faster towards the COM of the cane. This causes the effect to flip and the fingers slowly align themselves around the center of mass...
2. The phone is not evenly weighed, so spinning it in some axis would make it destabilize, right...? Well, the same effect is observed when spinning a brick (it fell on my foot... twice... while I tested that) that I played around with. I believe this effect occurs because of the fact that the center of mass of the brick/phone is in the middle of the whole object, so rotating it around the axis that allows more mass to rotate around further from the COM will work because the particles far away have to have less momentum, the spin is easier. On the other hand, spinning the phone the other way makes more particles have more energy, so this state is unstable. The phone starts to spin in a way that makes some of the particles decelerate, which is a more stable state (rhyme unintended). The same thing is observed when spinning around and then extending Your hands out, which causes You to decelerate.
3. This one is a bit of a troll... I tested deuterium water and distilled water... and the distilled one produced no (less) effect! It’s not the water that is attracted to the cup, it’s the stuff in it (ions)!!!
4. The cereal contains some iron, which is magnetic. This makes it attracted to the magnet... Maybe, but what is interesting is that water and glass, fex, are pushed away by magnets... it’s diamagnetic! Anyways... Maybe the magnet makes like a small cavity in the water that the cereal falls into? I did not observe one, I do not know, but I did manage to destroy a box of good cereal and throw the cereal all over the floor!
5. Hot air rises. As the hot air creates a rising bubble, the material the tea bag is made out of slowly burns away. When it gets light enough, it slowly flies up...

Hope I am correct. :)

HAND! (Have a nice day...)

EDIT: Watched the answers video... :)

[Adamantium]

1. As you move your fingers inward, the way the cane moves provides information to your subconscious mind, which automatically constantly adjusts the relative speeds of each of your hands to keep the cane balanced (Fairly confident).
2. Either the distribution of mass inside the phone is non-uniform (e.g. dense at opposite corners), or drag makes it spin on other axes in the same way it makes a falling coin eventually tumble even if it's dropped with no angular momentum (Fairly confident in the latter).
3 and 4. All neutral objects are weakly attracted to magnetic or electrically-charged objects, because the imposed field causes the neutral object's structure to change in sympathy. The charge on the cup causes the electrons in the water stream to move slightly towards or away from it, independent of their nuclei. This effectively _creates_ a macroscopic dipole regardless of whether or not the substance usually has them on the molecular level (Completely certain). Similarly, the magnet turns the piece of cereal into an electromagnet by aligning its magnetic moments (or whatever they're called) (Fairly confident).
5. The last fragments of the tea bag are carried upwards by the updraft portion of the convection current that the fire had whipped up (somewhat confident).

[ChaseRiver]

You know you're a geek when you have a water molecule just laying around.

[aidanwansbrough]

The last one is very cool! I got hold of 40 out of date teabags, and brought them in to science club! Thank you for the awesome ideas!!

[AlanKey]

*My Guesses*
1. If the cane becomes unbalanced, it will tilt and lift off one of your fingers, reducing friction between itself and that finger. Moving that finger will then require less effort and you be able to move it easily onwards. Eventually that finger will resume contact with the cane and you'll return the cane to a balanced state.

2.   Could it be that less energy is required to set up the rotation about the other axes?
I'm also going to write the words "Gryoscopes" and "Precession" to try and sound clever (even though I don't really understand them!

3. Could it be ions present in the water (not the water molecules themselves, but other elements dissolved in the water) that are either drawn towards the charged cup or repelled from it?
I guess the test would be to do it with super pure water... my prediction is the super pure water wouldn't deflect.

4. Cereal contains added iron.
My mum once wrote to Kellogg's to complain about the grey dust she found at the bottom of a box of Frosties. The wrote back explaining it was just added iron.

5. The flame heats the air above the teabag. Hot air rises in cool air, creating a convection current. The teabag, being very light, is lifted by this.

[qubicx]

1: The cane tilts to a side and that side has more friction so the other finger moves.(if that made any sense)
2: IDK
3: IDK
4: Cereal has iron in it. (I should know considering I had to take litteral iron pills)
5: The ash is rising with the hot air from the flame

[booJay]

At first I was like, _Why would a presumably tech savvy guy like __Derek Muller__ use an iPhone?_ Then when he dropped it, I was like, sense.*

[vbnnbvcx]

3:49 This is actually one of traditional games in my country. But normally we use an oil paper or newspaper. First we glue every end of corner each other, then we make a little hole at the center by using a needle. Then we blow the paper from the hole until it expands like a pillow. Finally we light every corner of the pillow paper at the same time. It will fly and look like a Japanese fireball ghost in the sky

[veritasium]

NEW VIDEO! The comment section is packed with great ideas! ... and also some less great ideas. A stream of water is not attracted to a charged object because water is a polar molecule!

[Tnmy]

1) The closer finger gets more downward force, causing friction, slowing down the movement over that finger, causing the other finger to go closer to the center of mass, this motion alternates and always ends up at the center of mass.
2) The phone will try to spin on the longest axis, which is the diagonal, and so flipping it that way causes the phone to wobble until it it spinning on one of those two axes. But then alternates between the two.
3) I don't know, everything I've been taught is a lie!
4) There is iron in the cereal! Check the nutritional information! HAHAHA
5) The tea bag is pretty lightweight, so when a lot of it burns off, the heated air causes it to lift off!

[karbon]

The Little Photon That Could

There once was a photon Whose light was too dim
He was laughed at by protons And quarks from within
See he had an idea, but he had to keep silent
He'd go back in time, to when his light was more vibrant
He journeyed through spacetime For eons he traveled
And only once his pace climbed The spacetime unraveled
He flashed through a wormhole The dimensions were plastered
"Faster!" He commanded “I need to go backward!!"
The wormhole then fractured He beamed out the exit
"The past has been captured I will be respected!!"
He said this with force As he wondered through space
Through darkness and vastness he slowed down his pace
He noticed his light, the brightness restored
More vibrant than ever, not an atom ignored
The protons and matter, in awe and astonished
They gazed at his glare, the brightest, the hottest
But something was missing There was something astray
All the matter was dismissing Everything running away
The Photon was stunned he looked so confused
"Wait where are you going? Please look at my light!"
He then stopped an atom before it excused
It said, "We're sorry Little Photon, you're just way too bright."

-Bradley Eversley

[ModItBetter]

I came for the Thunderfoot comments =P..love both channels..regardless..hehe..

[katyj]

Cereal has a very tiny amount of iron inside. If you crush an entire bag of cereal into powder and make it wet, turning into a mush, you can take a magnet and use it find the iron.