Vision is one of the main channels for obtaining information about the world around us. Today, ideas and social attitudes are broadcast everywhere through a picture, image, video. Often, the visual component replaces the ideological content for us, which is clearly seen in the current cinema. But for science, visualization is a huge blessing. Indeed, it is through an accessible, understandable picture that the phenomena can be intelligibly explained so that a person not only understands the essence, but also remembers it well. In addition, many scientific experiments just look beautiful.
We just found some interesting videos.
Have you ever seen manifestations of radiation? Frankly speaking, there are not many such opportunities in life. Offhand you can recall the northern lights and watches with tritium illumination. And some lucky ones could even admire the Vavilov-Cherenkov effect in a nuclear reactor. However, if you have a suitable freezer and a stack of alcohol, and a piece of uranium ore is lying in a drawer of the table, you can arrange a very beautiful visualization of the radiation of alpha particles.
The universe is ruled by gravity. Stars, star clusters, supermassive black holes and galaxies - all of them are sources of gravitational fields, creating an incomprehensibly complex fabric of space. Many of you are aware of the concept of a gravity well . But this teacher also came up with a very cheap and visual way to demonstrate the idea of the gravitational field:
At school, they explained to us that in a vacuum, bodies of different masses — say, a pen and a weight — would fall to the surface of our planet with the same acceleration. After all, then air resistance would not hurt them. It seems that many people remember this, but completely speculatively. But thanks to the world's largest vacuum chamber owned by NASA, this experiment can be carried out not only with a pen and weight, but even with a pen and a car, the dimensions allow.
The team of the Youtube channel Slo Mo Guys went to a round research pool , the walls of which are capable of creating concentric waves that shoot water to a height of up to 30 m. It looks very impressive.
Storm waves can cause a lot of trouble for all the inhabitants of the coastal strip. The constant pulsation of the ocean gradually erodes the coast, undermines rocks, destroys buildings. So we are trying in every possible way to protect the developed pieces of the coastline from the destructive blows of water. Where it is impossible or too expensive to build breakwaters, the banks are strengthened with various barriers, gabions, concrete and stone embankments. What is the effectiveness of all these facilities? This can be figured out quite simply:
Smokers have such fun - blowing smoke rings (ahtung, smoking is evil!). Smoke rings, or rather, ring vortices, from a bucket with a hole in the bottom are even cooler. They are very large and fly fast. And if such an annular vortex is illuminated by a flat laser beam, then one can see the movement of smoke in the section, with all its vortices. And just ordinary turbulences in seemingly still air are mesmerizing.
Sometimes scientists are interested in answers to very ... strange questions. States located in tropical latitudes often suffer from hurricanes coming from the ocean. But after all, these powerful winds hit the coastal areas long before our ancestors learned to sharpen sticks so that it was more convenient to catch potential food. Scientists wondered how hurricanes could affect natural selection in flora and fauna. And as part of the study, we experimented with one of the types of Caribbean lizard:
The problem of hurricanes is so urgent that the University of Miami built the world's largest installation for studying the breaking waves created by hurricanes. The installation allows you to simulate the conditions of hurricanes of the fifth category - with a wind speed of about 250 km / h.
Throw in the comments links to interesting videos with scientific experiments.
All with Friday!