The momentum is often used to analyse the dynamics of the motion of an experimental interaction between objects. Meanwhile, the interaction force tends to be challenging to observe and obtain. In this study, a simple video-assisted experiment was used to observe the interaction forces during the interaction of two magnetic objects. The interaction…

The vertical bounce of a plastic egg was investigated by dropping the egg on a horizontal surface and filming the result with a video camera. If the egg is dropped on one end then it bounces just like a spherical ball. If the top end of the egg is pointing forwards or backwards when it lands on the surface, or if the egg is spinning when it lands,…

Supersonic free-fall jumps are excellent examples of kinematics in the context of drag. They have attracted a lot of media, public, and scientific interest. In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a height of approximately 38.969 km. During his flight he reached a top speed of 373 m/s, becoming the first human to travel faster than the speed of…

A magnetic linear accelerator (or Gauss accelerator) is a device that uses the conversion of magnetic energy into kinetic energy to launch an object with high velocity. A simple experimental implementation consists of a line of steel spheres in which the first one is a permanent magnetic sphere. If another steel ball collides with the magnetic…

A science video blog, which has gone viral, shows a wooden block shot by a vertically aimed rifle. The video shows that the block hit dead center goes exactly as high as the one shot off-center. (Fig. 1). The puzzle is that the block shot off-center carries rotational kinetic energy in addition to the gravitational potential energy. This leads a…

Chemical kinetic experiments to determine rate laws are common in high school and college chemistry courses. For reactions involving a color change, rate laws can be determined experimentally using spectrophotometric or colorimetric equipment though this equipment can be cost prohibitive. Previous work demonstrated that inexpensive handheld camera…

Physics teachers often like to discuss physics concepts with their students on the basis of simple demonstration experiments. In this article, we discuss an experiment for which one only needs a few coins of the same denomination and a wooden stick: the coins are laid alongside the stick on a horizontal surface, the stick is rotated about one of…