Seeing as the original site has now fallen over, the actual youtube link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43-CfukEgs
And for the violently impatient, the actual drop: http://youtu.be/E43-CfukEgs?t=2m52s
The hammer-feather drop in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber [video]
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Re: The hammer-feather drop in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber [video]
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
Yes, although I thought the site I submitted actually had an interesting comment. The IO9 site less so, and hence in my judgement, on this occasion, the link I submitted was in some sense "better" than the raw youtube link. I think the guidelines are mis-guided in this sense. Sometimes the original, raw content is somewhere else, but a page that points to it can sometimes add context, or otherwise enhance that origin…
for people who can't load the linked article:
---begin quote--- …though in this case, “the hammer” is a bowling ball. In this [excellent clip]{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43-CfukEgs} from the BBC’s [Human Universe: Episode 4]{http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0276q28}, Professor Brian Cox visits NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio, home of the [world’s biggest vacuum chamber]{http://facilities.grc.nasa.gov/spf/#}, to test Galileo Galilei‘s Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment, circa 1589:
[If you drop a brick and a feather at the same time]{http://www.planetseed.com/laboratory/galileo-drops-ball-virt...} the brick will probably hit the ground first. But this is because of differences in the amount of friction between these objects and the air around them, not because their masses are different. If there were no air…
What happens? How does a hammer, brick, or bowling ball move in comparison to the feathers when you remove any air resistance? Watch.
Then watch this next: Apollo 15 Commander David Scott famously conducts this [same experiment in 1971… on the moon]{http://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/31056368331}. ---end quote---
Re: The hammer-feather drop in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber [video]
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
Yes, although I thought the site I submitted actually had an interesting comment. The IO9 site less so, and hence in my judgement, on this occasion, the link I submitted was in some sense "better" than the raw youtube link. I think the guidelines are mis-guided in this sense. Sometimes the original, raw content is somewhere else, but a page that points to it can sometimes add context, or otherwise enhance that origin…
Perhaps something like a Talk page on a MediaWiki platform? It would be out of the way but directly connected to the page you are on, a second set of comments accessible by a MetaTalk filter.
Re: The hammer-feather drop in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber [video]
#34The space and aerospace programs of the sixties produced some really impressive technologies and facilities. Too bad government spending on technology research went down, just imagine what could be possible.
From another perspective, these technologies left us with little science of utility (Tang?) while developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that loom over humanity like the Sword of Damocles. When historians from far off planets visit our nuclear wasteland they will see our thinly veiled space program as the beginning of end. :-)
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Re: The hammer-feather drop in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber [video]
#35I love how professionals who work at that facility and have probably deeply understood those principles for decades still display so much wonder at seeing this experiment with their own eyes.
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Re: The hammer-feather drop in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber [video]
#36I love how professionals who work at that facility and have probably deeply understood those principles for decades still display so much wonder at seeing this experiment with their own eyes.
I might be cynical, but I think they were putting on a show a bit. They already had some sort of apparatus set up to do the simultaneous drops.
My guess is that it's a standard demonstration for visiting dignitaries and the like.
Re: The hammer-feather drop in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber [video]
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a Brian Cox show we're talking about, not a science show. I'm surprised there weren't more slow mo shots of Cox doing his "boyish wonder" face.
I too though this "boyish wonder" face was phony. And yet the "boyish wonder" face will change the fate of the whole video when I show it to my 7yo. The rest is concrete and iron, not really appealing to kids, despite the potential awesomeness of the huge vacuum chamber.
Indeed, but the show is on primetime BBC2, not CBBC or CBeebies.
Ah, I guess anything that brings more viewers to science content is good. I just miss the old days of Horizon.
Re: The hammer-feather drop in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber [video]
#38I know how this will turn out but my intuition is screaming otherwise.
I find it interesting that Brian Cox, the presenter and avowed scientist, obviously finds it so 'surprising' as well. Maybe that's the true meaning of being a scientist, though - he doesn't truly believe it until observing it with his own eyes.
>Brian Cox, the presenter and avowed scientist,
I think you mean "Brian Cox: Professor of High-energy Particle Physics, member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (who also presents popular science programmes in the UK)"
I think his career as a scientist deserves a little more recognition than "avowed".
And, as for his career in popular science he has been awarded both a Faraday and a Kelvin prize.
Re: The hammer-feather drop in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber [video]
#39It interesting some people think a vacuum means a lot of pressure but really it's the same as 10 meters under water at sea level pressure.
^, explosive decompression in space also isn't as explosive as coming up from a few meters underwater in one go (it's from 1 to 0 atmospheres, instead of 100 to 1).
Not that I advocate explosive decompression in any circumstance, mind you.
Re: The hammer-feather drop in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber [video]
#40Seeing as the original site has now fallen over, the actual youtube link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43-CfukEgs
And for the violently impatient, the actual drop: http://youtu.be/E43-CfukEgs?t=2m52s
Fortunately you beat me to it. I was going to post the later sequence at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43-CfukEgs&feature=youtu.be...
But on closer viewing that is a disastrous montage: the first few seconds (before cut away) show the feathers fluttering and the bowling ball starting to accelerate away; the slow-motion segue is under vacuum conditions though. The film editor's intention is that the two shots appear contiguous. We can speculate why they might have done this (no close up shot taken under vacuum conditions?) but it really tramples the whole point of the article :(