• Question: what is your favriot exsperiment

    Asked by james2000 to John, Carol, Ellie, Philip, Rebecca on 28 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Philip Glasson

      Philip Glasson answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      What is your favorite experiment?

      An experiment doesn’t have to be a big thing in a lab.
      An experiment is anything where you have an idea of how the world works
      and you test it!

      They can be every day things
      From do you like chocolate cake, toooo can you freeze a mars-bar with liquid nitrogen. =)

      But my favorite experiment, (which is not so small..)

      Is something called the ‘Young’s Double Slit Experiment’

      Pass light through a single slit in a piece of paper and you get a projection of a single slit.

      Pass light through a double slit in a piece of paper and you get a projection of hundreds of slits.

      Now if that isn’t weird enough, the same thing happens no matter what you shine at the slits, Light, electrons, waves on water, tinny balls, they always make a pattern of hundreds of slits……and nobody knows why!

      See some pictures


      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

    • Photo: John Welford

      John Welford answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      I saw my favourite experiment quite recently. It is to do with scientists proving that it is possible to “sail directly downwind faster than the wind”

      If you stop and think about that sentence for a minute it doesn’t sound possible at all does it, surely if you are being blown by the wind then the maximum speed you can sail at is the speed of the wind – right? Wrong! Crazy as it sounds, it is possible!

      I think they have only done it by “sailing” on land using wheels, but they have built a big device and demonstrated it. It doesn’t have a conventional sail, instead it has a propeller that is linked to the wheels.
      Here it is:

      It’s not very exciting because you can’t see how fast the wind is!

      The best part is this experiment that can be done to prove the theory:
      Instead of taking a cart outside and putting it on a stationary floor with a constant wind, you can put it on a constantly moving floor (like a treadmill) and keep the wind (the air in the room) stationary.
      This is the exact same experiment but you have changed your “inertial reference frame”.

      Here is a video of a cart climbing uphill on a treadmill powered only by the treadmill.

      Crazy eh?

    • Photo: Carol White

      Carol White answered on 1 Jul 2012:

      Testing gravity hills!

      There are some places in the UK where if you let the car roll… you’d expect it to go down the hill. BUT in these weird places, the car actually rolls up the hill! Have a google and convince your parents to take you!

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