NASA gets dramatic. But the drama is oh so appropriate when you see what they have to do to land a rover on Mars. There are so many steps to the landing — heat shields, atmospheric friction, parachute, rockets — that it’ll be amazing if it works, and the video is a wonderful “strike the imagination” introduction to the physics of forces.
Tag: video
About Fire (Flames Really)
Ben Ames explains the science of flames.
It skims over pyrolysis; chemiluminescence, where the chemical reaction (combustion/oxidation) produces excited atoms and molecules that need spit out (emit) blue light to get to their ground state); and the incandescent light emission of microscopic soot particles which produce the yellow parts of the flame.
I’m not sure who the guy chained to the rock is. It might be Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, but I don’t remember him being sent into hell in the myth.
Vi Hart’s Math Doodles
Vi Hart has some excellent videos where she gives you things to doodle during math class (see her YouTube channel). There’s lots of wonderful geometry and algebra. The Fibonacci sequence video below is a great example:
Bonding
A cute little video about ionic and covalent bonds by 10th grade chemistry student Eli Cirino.
Networks versus Trees: Ways of Analyzing the World
Manuel Lima contrasts the traditional, hierarchical, view of the world (evolution’s tree of life for example) to a more network oriented perspective.
One interesting part is the interpretation of the history of science as having three phases, dealing with Problems of:
- Simplicity: Early scientific efforts (17th-19th centuries) was focused on “simple” models of cause and effect — embodied perhaps in Newton’s Laws, where every force has an equal and opposite force.
- Disorganized Complexity: Think early 20th century nuclear physics — Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle for example — where the connections between events are complicated and sort of random/probabilistic.
- Organized Complexity: Systems science sees the interrelatedness of everything: ecologic food webs; the Internet; horizontal gene transfer across the limbs of the tree of life.
Music of the Fibonacci Sequence
Tool‘s Lateralus has the Fibonacci Sequence embedded into it. Ms. Wilson tells me that some of her Algebra II students were able to detect it out after listening to the song (a few times), but this video has the highlights where the sequence occurs.
↬ Ms. Wilson
Searching for the Higgs Boson: How Science Really Works
PhD Comics does a wonderful job of explaining of sub-atomic particles: what we know, what we don’t know. What’s particularly great about this video is that it goes into how physicists are using the Large Hadron Collider to try to discover new particles: by making graphs of millions of collisions of particles and looking for the tiniest of differences between different predictions of what might be there.
I also like how clear they make the fact that science is a processes of discovery, and what fascinates scientists is the unknown. Students do experiments all the time and if they don’t find what they expect — if it “doesn’t work” — they’re usually very disappointed. I try my best to let them know that this is really what science is about. When your experiment does not do what you want, and you’re confident you designed it right, then the real excitement, the new discoveries, begin.