Welcome


The title says it all: this blog features physics videos found everywhere on the web: animations, demonstrations, lectures, documentaries.
Please go here if you want to suggest other nice physics videos, and here if I mistakingly infringed your copyrights. If you understand French, you'll find a huge selection of physics videos in French in my other blog Vidéos de Physique.

Thursday 31 May 2012

Momentum, Magnets & Metal Balls - Sixty Symbols

Looking at momentum with the aid of steel balls and a neodymium magnet. Featuring Professor Roger Bowley.

Other Sixty Symbols videos

Science off the Sphere: Space Soundwaves II- Electric Didgeridoo

In his off-duty time, NASA Astronaut Don Pettit likes to explore scientific curiosities of his own design. Sometimes that means cutting his shirt up and playing the space station vacuum cleaner like a didgeridoo.

Other Science off the Sphere videos

Saturday 26 May 2012

Falling with Friction

With a low mass and a large surface area, the coffee filters reach terminal velocity very quickly. When a falling object reaches terminal velocity it stops accelerating and moves at constant velocity. Analyzed by Vernier Video Physics.
Kibae Lee, Tara Lamb, Caleb Williamson, Jessica Gales.

Other videos by St-Mary's High School

CERN News - Neutralino back from Space

ESA astronaut and former CERN physicist Christer Fuglesang returns a symbolic neutralino particle to CERN after flying it to the International Space Station on the occasion of his STS128 mission in 2009.

 

Monday 21 May 2012

Petabytes of data at Large Hadron Collider - Sixty Symbols

This question is posed on behalf of many Sixty Symbols viewers who asked about it. With thanks to David Barney and Steven Goldfarb, from CMS and ATLAS respectively.

Other Sixty Symbols videos

Sunday 20 May 2012

Barkhausen Effect

A soft iron core is placed inside a solenoid having several hundred turns of fine wire. The coil winding is connected to a loudspeaker. Audible results of the Barkhausen Effect are produced by slowly moving a permanent magnet toward the solenoid core. A loud rasping sound will be heard caused by the domains aligning themselves. Successive passes produce no sound until the polarity of the magnet is changed.

See other MIT physics demos

Science off the Sphere: Goo!

Don uses his computer speakers to test the behavior of non-newtonian fluids in the weightless environment aboard the International Space Station. Answer the Challenge question at Physics Central for a chance for your name to be read from space!

Other Science off the Sphere videos

Saturday 19 May 2012

Spinning Disk Trick

Objects hang heavy side down, but what happens when you spin an asymmetrically weighted disk - well the heavy part actually rises to the top. Why is this?

Other Veritasium videos



The explaination:

CCD: The heart of a digital camera (how a charge-coupled device works)

Bill Hammack takes apart a digital camera and explains how its captures images using a CCD (charge coupled device). He also shares how a single CCD is used with a color filter array to create colored images.

Other "Engineer Guy" videos

 

Tuesday 15 May 2012

Total Cereal and Magnetism

Take a strong neodymium magnet to the breakfast table tomorrow morning and have fun with your Total cereal. What is in Total that attracts a magnet? Experiment with other cereals and see if you get the same result. (Kate Naranjo)

Other videos by St-Mary's High School

 

Virus-based piezoelectric energy generator

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity. The milestone could lead to tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks. The first part of the video shows how Berkeley Lab scientists harness the piezoelectric properties of the virus to convert the force of a finger tap into electricity. The second part reveals the "viral-electric" generators in action, first by pressing only one of the generators, then by pressing two at the same time, which produces more current.

More info.


Monday 14 May 2012

ScienceCasts: Don't Judge a Moon by its Cover

Superficially, Saturn's moon Phoebe doesn't look much like a planet, but on the inside, the little gray moon has a lot in common with worlds like Earth.

 

How to Count Infinity

Other Minute Physics videos

Why Are Astronauts Weightless?

In this segment, the Veritasium guy asks why astronauts in the space station are weightless. The most common answer is because there is no gravity in space. But of course there is gravity in space, especially where the space station is located (only about 400km from Earth's surface). So astronauts still experience a gravitational pull - it's just that they and the space station are in free fall so they are accelerating together towards the Earth. The space station doesn't crash into the Earth because of its orbital velocity - it's going 28,000 km/h so as it falls, the Earth curves away from it.

Other Veritasium videos

Wednesday 9 May 2012

Will the LHC destroy the world? - Sixty Symbols

CERN's Large Hadron Collider will NOT destroy our planet. But many of you asked about it - and the "scenarios" are a good excuse to discuss some cool physics. Dr Tony Padilla discusses a few doomsday theories from the very centre of the famed accelerator ring. Stand back and keep an eye out for black holes and strangelets!!!

Other Sixty Symbols videos

Tuesday 8 May 2012

Touch Screens & Quantum Tunnelling - Sixty Symbols

We look at the latest touch screen technology and how it uses the strange phenomenon of quantum tunnelling.

Other Sixty Symbols videos

Sunday 6 May 2012

Where Does The Sun Get Its Energy?

The sun has been producing light for about five billion years but where does all its energy come from? The most common idea is that the sun is burning gas - like a giant fireball in the sky. If this were true, the sun would have gone out long ago. So how is the sun actually fuelling itself? It is converting its own mass into energy. By combining protons (the nucleus of hydrogen) into helium, it squeezes some mass into energy - 4.3 billion kg per second. It is Einstein's famous E=mc^2 which gives us the quantitative relationship between mass and energy, where c is the speed of light.

Other Veritasium videos

Saturday 5 May 2012

Ohm's law tutorial: Physics for neuroscience and cardiac physiology

Easy to learn this basic physics concept. Electrical physics/engineering, has much in common with neuroscience/cardiophysiology.

Red Diffraction on a Blu-Ray

Using a CD, a DVD and a Blu-Ray disk as a diffraction grating.

Surface White Light Interference Microscopy

Demonstration of Surface Profile Microanalysis.

ScienceCasts: A Star Turns Inside Out

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has mapped the debris of a supernova and discovered that the explosion may have turned the original star inside out. Peering into the heart of the inverted star, astronomers have found the atoms of life itself.

Thursday 3 May 2012

Science off the Sphere: Space Soundwaves

Don demonstrates water oscillations on a speaker in microgravity, and ZZ Top rocks the boat 250 miles above Earth.

Other Science off the Sphere videos

Why the solar system can exist

If gravity is so attractive, why doesn't the earth just crash into the sun? Or the moon into the earth?

Other Minute Physics videos