Force & Motion

Although the problem of why coffee spills might seem trivial, it actually brings together a variety of fundamental scientific issues. These include fluid mechanics, the stability of fluid surfaces, and interactions between fluids and structures (we’ll set aside the biology of walking for now). The SpillNot is a cool tool for getting your students interested in the everyday physics behind why drinks spill while we’re carrying them and what has to happen to prevent spillage.

Students often underestimate the force of friction despite friction stopping their school buses and cars everyday. In this video 2 phone books are interwoven page by page and the friction between these thin peaces of paper are put to the ultimate test.

It was 8:45 AM in Florence and I was waiting for one of the highlights of my 2012 Italian family vacation the chance to see the original creations for one of the greatest minds of the 17th century, Galileo. Take a tour of the Galileo Museum with me and see the classic Physics demos as they were in the 1600's.

Think back to when you were a little kid playing one of your most enjoyable family games on Saturday night. It involved rolling a die and moving around a game board, all while building a complex “mousetrap”, hoping that you wouldn’t get caught in its devious shenanigans or secretly wishing that its numerous “Energy Transfers” would fail to work!

Whether we realize it or not, all velocity/speed measurements are made relative to some other object. When your car's speedometer reads 55 mph, the assumption is that the change in position of the car compared to the stationary ground is 55 miles every hour. However, not all velocity/speed measurements are made relative to a stationary object. The Constant Velocity cars allow students to experimentally investigate relative speeds as the cars with different speeds move in the same and in opposite directions.

Bottle rocket launchers can be a great way to increase interest as your class kicks off this Fall. We’ve collected some tips for how to get more out of these rocket powered demonstrations and launch your students into the world of force and motion in full Cool Stuff fashion.

Hold a friendly contest to engage interest [...]

Spin this top once, and it will run for…. well quite a while. But how does it work? Interesting question since rotational energy can not come out of nowhere. You will need to look deep inside the Perpetual Top to find the secret of its seemingly endless rotational energy.

When you first open the package, you’ll [...]

Fact or Fiction??

The Amazing Water Slide: How it was done
Last week we shared a video clip of a man in a neoprene wetsuit sliding down a water slide, hitting a ramp, and then flying 115 feet through the air to land safely in a small children's pool. Just like many video segments from the web [...]

Many scientific measuring instruments have dials with pointers to indicate the magnitude of the measurements. A pointer is actually a lever which magnifies the distance that the instrument moves. In ordinary clocks, speedometers and electric meters for example, the rotating shafts move very small distances, but the pointers greatly magnify these motions so they are easy to see.

A truck is traveling 60mph, a baseball shoots out of the back at 60mph. Do you really expect the ball to drop straight down?