Just a few miles down the highway from Open Culture’s gleaming headquarters you will find Los Gatos High School, where Dan Burns, an AP Physics Teacher, has figured out a simple but clever way to visualize gravity, as it was explained by Einstein’s 1915 General Theory of Relativity. Get $20 of spandex, some marbles, a couple of weights, and you’re all good to go. Using these readily-available objects, you can demonstrate how matter warps space-time, how objects gravitate towards one another, and why objects orbit in the way they do. My favorite part comes at the 2:15 mark, where Burns demonstrates the answer to a question you’ve maybe pondered before: why do all planets happen to orbit the sun moving in a clockwise (rather than counter-clockwise) fashion? Now you can find out why.
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It is one of the most famous experiments in all of science history, but there’s significant doubt about whether it actually took place. Did Galileo drop objects of differing mass from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in 1589 to demonstrate the theories proposed in his unpublished text De motu (“Of Motion”)? Rice University’s Galileo Project notes that scholars have long thought Galileo’s references to experiments he conducted “were only rhetorical devices.” As PBS’s NOVA writes, “it’s the kind of story that’s easy to imagine, easy to remember, but whether he ever performed the experiment at the tower is debatable.” That’s not to say Galileo didn’t test any of his ideas while he taught at the University of Pisa during 1589 and 1592, only that his most famous theory about the effects of gravity on free-falling objects rests mainly on a conceptual thought experiment.
In fact, it would have been impossible for Galileo to fully demonstrate his theory because of the effects of air resistance. Subtract the atmosphere, however, and we can easily confirm Galileo’s hypothesis that any two objects, regardless of weight, shape, or material of composition, will fall at exactly the same rate when dropped. One of the most memorable times this experiment did take place was not in Italy or anywhere else on earth, but on the Moon, when astronaut David Scott, commander of the Apollo 15 mission, dropped a geologic hammer and a falcon’s feather at the same time in 1971 (above).
As cool as Commander Scott’s experiment is, it’s still not as dramatic as the version of the experiment at the top of the post, conducted at NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio in the world’s largest vacuum chamber. A great deal of the drama comes courtesy of physicist Brian Cox, who presents the experiment for BBC Two’s Human Universe, explaining the history and construction of the vacuum chamber, which simulates the conditions of outer space. Then we’ve got the multiple camera angles and dramatic music… typical TV show stuff, effective nonetheless at setting us up for the big drop. Even though we “know how the experiment will end,” points out io9, and may have seen it performed before—on the Moon even—this demonstration is something special.
First, we get an anticlimactic drop of the objects—a bowling ball and a feather—while the chamber is still full of air. As expected, the ball plummets, the feathers gently drift. Then, in a sequence right out of a sci-fi film, engineers seal off the enormous chamber, and the three-hour removal of air is telescoped into a few second montage of pushings of buttons and mumblings into intercoms. What happens next will… well, you know the clickbait verbiage. But it certainly surprises Cox and a roomful of NASA engineers. Cox goes on to explain, using Einstein’s theory of general relativity, that the reason the objects fall at the same rate is “because they’re not falling; they’re standing still.” The science may be common knowledge, but seeing it in action is indeed pretty mind blowing.
I’ve spent the past week on a road trip across America, and, during it, experienced perhaps my most intense case of déjà vu ever. Rolling into Memphis for the first time in my life, I walked into the lobby of the hotel at which I’d reserved a room for the night and immediately felt, in every fiber of my being, that I’d walked into that lobby before. But I then realized exactly why: it followed the same floor plan, to the last detail — the same front desk, the same business center computers, the same café with the same chalkboard asking me to “Try Our Classic Oatmeal” — of the one I’d visited the previous day in Oklahoma City.
Should we chalk this up to generic American placemaking at its most efficient, or can we find a more interesting psychological phenomenon at work? Michio Kaku, though best known for his work with physics, has some ideas of his own about what we experience when we experience déjà vu. “There is a theory,” says Kaku in the Big Think video above,“that déjà vu simply elicits fragments of memories that we have stored in our brain, memories that can be elicited by moving into an environment that resembles something that we’ve already experienced.”
But wait! “Is it ever possible on any scale,” he then tantalizingly asks, “to perhaps flip between different universes?” And does déjà vu tell us anything about our position in those universes, giving us signs of the others even as we reside in just one? Kaku quotes an analogy first made by physicist Steven Weinberg which frames the notion of a “multiverse” in terms of our vibrating atoms and the frequency of a radio’s signal: “If you’re inside your living room listening to BBC radio, that radio is tuned to one frequency. But in your living room there are all frequencies: radio Cuba, radio Moscow, the Top 40 rock stations. All these radio frequencies are vibrating inside your living room, but your radio is only tuned to one frequency.” And sometimes, for whatever reason, we hear two signals on our radio at once.
Given that, then, maybe we feel déjà vu when the atoms of which we consist “no longer vibrate in unison with these other universes,” when “we have decoupled from them, we have decohered from them.” It may relieve you to know there won’t be an exam on all this. While Kaku ultimately grants that “déjà vu is probably simply a fragment of our brain eliciting memories and fragments of previous situations,” you may get a kick out of putting his multiverse idea in context with some more traditional explanations, such as the ones written about in venues no less dependable than Scientific American and Smithsonian. But in any case, I beg you, Marriott Courtyard hotels: change up your designs once in a while.
I found it difficult to wrap my head around the sheer quantities of information Savage shoehorns into the seven minute video, giving similarly voluble and omnivorous mathmusician Vi Hart a run for her money. Clearly, he understands exactly what he’s talking about, whereas I had to take the review quiz in an attempt to retain just a bit of this new-to-me material.
I’m glad he glossed over Feynman’s childhood fascination with inertia in order to spend more time on the lesser known of his three subjects. Little Feynman’s observation of his toy wagon is charming, but the Nobel Prize winner’s life became an open book to me with Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick’s excellent graphic biography. What’s left to discover?
How about Eratosthenes? I’d never before heard of the Alexandrian librarian who calculated the Earth’s circumference with astonishing accuracy around 200 BC. (It helped that he was good at math and geography, the latter of which he invented.) Inspiration fuels the arts, much as it does science, and I’d like to learn more about him.
Ditto Fizeau, whom Savage describes as a less sexy scientific swashbuckler than methodical fact checker, which is what he was doing when he wound up cracking the speed of light in 1849. Two centuries earlier Galileo used lanterns to determine that light travels at least ten times faster than sound. Fizeau put Galileo’s number to the test, experimenting with his notched wheel, a candle, and mirrors and ultimately setting the speed of light at a much more accurate 313,300 Km/s. Today’s measurement of 299792.458 km/s was arrived at using technology unthinkable even a few decades ago.
Personally, I would never think to measure the speed of light with something that sounds like a zoetrope, but I might write a play about someone who did.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday
I first encountered bongo-playing physicist Richard Feynman in a college composition class geared toward science majors. I was not, mind you, a science major, but a disorganized sophomore who registered late and grabbed the last available seat in a required writing course. Skeptical, I thumbed through the reading in the college bookstore. As I browsed Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!—the first of many popular memoirs released by the affable contrarian scientist—the humanist in me perked up. Here was a guy who knew how to write; a theoretical physicist who spoke the language of everyday people.
Feynman cultivated his populist persona to appeal to those who might be otherwise turned off by abstract, abstruse scientific concepts. Like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, his name has come to stand for the best examples of popular science communication. It is often through one of Feynman’s accessible, non-specialist books or presentations that people learn of his work with the Manhattan project, his contributions to quantum mechanics, and his Nobel Prize. But Feynman’s extracurricular pursuits—from safe-cracking to drumming to experimenting with LSD—were also genuine expressions of his idiosyncratic character, as was another of his passions for which he is not very well known: art.
Feynman took up the pursuit at the age of 44, and continued to draw and paint for the rest of his life, signing his work “Ofey.” Many of his drawings display the awkward, off-kilter perspective of the beginner, and a great many others look very accomplished indeed. In an introductory essay to a published collection of his artwork, Feynman describes what motivated him to take up this particular avocation:
I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run ‘behind the scenes’ by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.
As you can see above, he took his work seriously. Most of his drawings consist of portraits and nudes, with the occasional landscape or still life. You can see more extensive galleries of Feynman’s art at AmusingPlanet, Museum Syndicate and Brain Pickings.
Feynman’s preoccupation—and full immersion—in the relationship between the arts and sciences marks him as a Renaissance man in perhaps the purest definition of the term: his approach closely resembles that of Leonardo da Vinci, a likeness that comes to the fore in the work below, which is either a collection of sketches doodled over with formulae, or a collection of formulae covered with doodles. Either way, it’s a perfect representation of the visionary mind of Feynman and his regard for ordinary language, people, and objects—and for “scientific awe.”
Last year, we revisited the high school days of Neil deGrasse Tyson. Growing up in New York City during the 1970s, Tyson attended Bronx Science (class of ’76), ran an impressive 4:25 mile, captained the school’s wrestling team, and, he fondly recalls, wore basketball sneakers belonging to the Knick’s Walt “Clyde” Frazier. Tyson was, of course, also a precocious student. Famously, Carl Sagan recruited Tyson to study with him at Cornell. But Tyson politely declined and went to Harvard for his undergraduate studies. Then, he headed off to Texas, to start his PhD at UT-Austin. That’s where the photo, taken circa 1980, captures him above — hanging out with friends, and looking hipper than your average astrophysics student.
This photo (now making the rounds on Reddit) originally appeared in a 2012 article published in the Alcalde, the alumni magazine of The University of Texas. To the magazine’s credit, the article takes an unvarnished look at Tyson’s “failed experiment” in Texas. The piece starts with the lede “Neil deGrasse Tyson, MA ’83, is the public face of science. But he says his success has nothing to do with UT.” And, from there, it recounts how professors and university police immediately stereotyped him.
The first comment directed to me in the first minute of the first day by a faculty member I had just met was, ‘You must join the department basketball team!
or
I was stopped and questioned seven times by University police on my way into the physics building. Seven times. Zero times was I stopped going into the gym—and I went to the gym a lot. That says all you need to know about how welcome I felt at Texas.
But the real problem wasn’t race. According to Tyson, “there was simply no room for me to be the full person that I was.” “An obsessive focus on one thing at a time; a strong connection to pop culture, from the moonwalk to the Rubik’s cube; and a refusal to put research first: these traits contributed to Tyson’s failure at UT,” concludes the Alcalde. They also allowed him to flourish later in life.
After his “advisors dissolved his dissertation committee—essentially flunking him,” Tyson transferred to Columbia, earned his PhD in 1988, and became the greatest popularizer of science since Carl Sagan. We like stories with happy endings.
Read more about Tyson’s experience in Texas at the Alcalde.
Patreon, a crowd funding site where fans can automatically tithe a set amount to their fave artist every time that person uploads content, is a great way for passionate, under-recognized individuals to gain visibility and a bit of dough.
So what’s astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson doing there? He’s already famous, and one would think his gig as director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, coupled with the proceeds from his books and dvds, would prove sufficient to any financial needs.
The latest Tyson-narrated episode, above, shoots the moon by cramming the entire History of the Universe (and some complimentary Stravinsky) into an 8.5‑minute framework (a negligible amount when you consider phenomena like light years, but still many times the series’ standard minute).
If you’re feeling flush (or nervous about the upcoming school year), you can join these 1075 fans, earning admission to a supporters-only activity feed where you can ask questions, watch outtakes, preview upcoming attractions, and possibly even get your name in the credits.
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