7) Walking barefoot in a crate of broken glass
8) Standing barefoot on two dozen raw eggs (one dozen for each foot)
[requires practice getting on and off]
9) Using sledge hammer to smash cinder block resting on top of large
piece of wood (e.g. section of tree trunk) on top of person lying on bed
of nails
10) Using Van der Graaf generator to make hair stand
11) Using Van der Graaf generator to make aluminum pie pans float
Daniel Crowe
Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics
Ardmore Regional Center
dcrowe@sotc.org
-----Original Message-----
From: Forum for Physics Educators [mailto:PHYS-L@list1.ucc.nau.edu] On
Behalf Of Folkerts, Timothy J
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 4:01 PM
To: PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU
Subject: [PHYS-L] Science "Magic" Demos
I volunteered to give a ~ 50 min presentation on "science magic" to
~20-30 high school students in about 3 weeks and was hoping some people
here had some favorites they might like to share. Hopefully the demos
will be 1) entertaining, 2) educational, 3) low budget and 4) not too
difficult to perform. I plan to present a brief explanation of each
feat, but no really involved derivations or anything like that.
Some current ideas include
1) bed of nails (I'd have to build one soon)
2) string tied above & below a heavy weight (slow pull breaks top
string, quick tug breaks bottom string.
3) cabbage juice pH indicator.
4) juggling on a force plate (showing that the average force is the same
whether juggling or not)
5) Bernoulli ping pong ball suspended on a stream of air.
6) cooling & crushing a container full of steam
Do these sound reasonable? Any other ideas? Links to website with
similar info? I don't think these will take 10 min each, so I need a
few more!