It’s always fun to see this demonstrated. Here’s Haggis Henderson, at the recent NZ Institute of Physics conference in Christchurch, not only lying on a bed of nails but having a teenager stand on him too. He survived the experience, though I can’t vouch for what his back looked like afterwards. The bed of nails […]
Continue readingTag: Newton’s laws
Bell ringing
Only a week more to go in Perth. Time here has gone so quickly. It’s then off to UK for Easter to see my family before returning to Waikato. On Saturday we had a tour of the bell tower on the waterfront. It’s a great looking structure (in my opinion) – and houses the original […]
Continue readingThe indeterminate cheese flake
A couple of days ago I arrived 'home' to discover our local ant colony at work. There's a nest located somewhere in the bushes at the front of our temporary home, and the occupants have become rather adept at raiding our kitchen. Anything left on the kitchen bench is fair game for the taking. Ants […]
Continue readingThe universal joint
…No, it isn’t something everyone smokes… But it is common in machine mechanisms. The universal joint is a neat way of turning rotation in one plane into rotation in another. A common use is on driveshafts where you want the direction of the shaft to bend. There’s a neat animation on Wikipedia of how the […]
Continue readingTip or slide?
We had our departmental Christmas lunch on Tuesday, outside in the campus grounds. We had some lovely sunshine, but the wind did rather spoil things. I've certainly got used now to living in a very wind-free place – a fresh breeze is something quite unsual here. We were hanging on to our paper plates, but […]
Continue readingAttacked by an umbrella
We have a spring-loaded umbrella at home. The idea is that you press a button, and it automatically springs into shape – its shaft springs out and the canopy unfolds. I've often wondered about the wisdom of such a mechanism and thought what would happen if it went off in an inconvenient confined space, such […]
Continue readingPlants in circular motion
In our first-year physics lab we have the following horticultural experiment. Here we have some bulbs growing on a rotating turntable. The array of five pots is placed on the turntable so that the centre pot is at the centre of the turntable; the left- and right-hand pots are at the perimeter.The turntable is rotating […]
Continue readingIf gravity increased…
A colleague remarked to me yesterday, as we were trudging up the two flights of stairs from the tea-room to the third floor, "I'm sure they turn up the force of gravity in this building each year." I feel like that too, sometimes. However, I suspect it has more to do with the aging process […]
Continue readingAxis labels – accurate but not at all obvious
I had a conversation with a class this morning regarding the labelling of axes on graphs.In particular, how we should indicate the units. Most quantities we deal with in physics carry units. A speed might be 35 km/h, a distance might be 16.8 mm, a pressure could be 28 kPa. Saying that a speed is […]
Continue readingStatic friction is something sticky (as is Scholarship physics)
In January I had a go at the 2014 Scholarship Physics Exam, as I've done for the last couple of years. Sam Hight from the PhysicsLounge came along to help (or was it laugh?) The idea of this collaboration is that I get filmed attempting to do the Scholarship paper for the first time. This […]
Continue reading