There have been a lot of cool things I’ve found on the web recently (mainly videos). I thought I should share.
First of all, there’s this video of a water balloon hitting the ground at high speed in slow motion. It doesn’t break, but there are awesome shockwaves.
Next, here’s a video of an experiment to demonstrate that traffic jams happen even without a bottleneck. You can see the compression wave traveling down the road. And also, here’s one of a java applet that simulates the same thing!
Here’s a link to a video of a mini-experiment showing the basic principles behind a particle accelerator. It uses a n electric bowl and a ping pong ball!
Next, a game of Asteroids that takes special relativity into account! Finally!
Now a more directly educational link; here’s Sean Carroll on Bloggingheads talking about cosmology. He explains what exactly “big bang” means, and what Inflation is. He also talks about the validity of new theories of the early universe, the multiverse theory and cuts through most of the crap that the media tends to churn out.
Finally, here’s a video of a pool filled with a non-newtonian fluid (corn starch in water). Just watch. It’s awesome.
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