2015/11/15

Physics Circus

A frozen banana is super fascinating: Last Friday, an elementary school visited the UCSB and some volunteers from the "Physics Circus" performed a show with fancy physics experiments. We started with a demonstration of what's called the angular momentum. Somebody was sitting on a turning chair, got weights into his hands and was spun around. It's quite difficult to keep the balance, but you're faster with the weights pulled in (the energy is not invested in carrying the weights "the longer way" far away from the body, so it goes into the turning speed - that's at least the fast, non-formula explanation).


Physics Circus T-Shirt.

The phase transition part was probably most exciting, because a huge container of liquid nitrogen froze everything, including a banana which became so hard that you could nail with it. Flowers became stiff and broke - and (the highlight!) marshmallows "sounded" like rocks on a board because they were iced. But everybody still got a frozen marshmallow and they're edible!