demonstration

A controlled demonstration by Wabash National of a tank trailer collapsing under vacuum, staged at an industry expo. The tank implodes as air is pulled out.

A WiebeTech marketing demo of HotPlug, a device that moves a running computer onto battery or another power source so it can be transported without shutting down.

Veritasium recounts a $10,000 bet with a UCLA physics professor over whether a vehicle can travel downwind faster than the wind. He presents the professor's reasoning and demonstrations, including one without aerodynamics.

Veritasium revisits Thomas Young's original double slit experiment with light, showing how interference supports the wave nature of light. It uses a pond-wave demonstration to explain the pattern.

LockPickingLawyer shows what happens when liquid gallium is applied to an aluminum Abus padlock, which weakens and breaks the metal. It is a short demonstration of gallium's effect on aluminum.

A Corning-sponsored video in which Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman introduce flexible, bendable glass. It covers the history of glass innovation with demonstrations of bendable optical fiber and ultra-thin glass.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day undergoes hypoxia training and experiences his own impaired thinking as oxygen is withdrawn. The video shows how quickly and unnoticeably oxygen deprivation degrades judgment, illustrating why you put your own mask on first.

Veritasium explains why bicycles are stable, arguing that gyroscopic effects are not the answer. The video shows countersteering and an experiment where riders blocked from steering the opposite way cannot turn.

Veritasium asks people where a tree's mass comes from, then explains that most of a dry tree's mass originates from carbon dioxide in the air. It combines street interviews with a short explanation of photosynthesis.

Numberphile with Tom Crawford of Oxford explains the Reynolds number, the second of three videos on Navier-Stokes and fluid flow, with demonstrations of laminar versus turbulent behavior.

A hands-on comparison of how jet fuel, diesel, heating oil, kerosene, avgas and gasoline burn and what color they are. It shows that gasoline ignites more easily than jet fuel.

California Superbike School demonstrates its 'No B.S.' bike, which has fixed handlebars so riders can only steer with body lean. It illustrates how little control that gives compared with countersteering.

Mark Rober tests whether self-driving cars can be fooled, comparing a lidar-equipped car with a camera-only Tesla in scenarios including a painted Wile E. Coyote wall and smoke.

A short NIST-based demonstration places a room furnished with old natural-material furniture beside one with modern synthetic furnishings and burns both. The modern room reaches full flashover in a few minutes while the legacy room is only starting to spread.

LightningOnDemand revives a pulsed Lorentz plasma cannon, using modern capacitors to extend its range and increase the delivered energy. It is a high-voltage, high-current hobby demonstration.

NightHawkInLight demonstrates how a Tesla valve works by sending a propane flame front through one, making the flow visible. It is a short, hands-on experiment video.

Grace Hopper appears on Letterman and uses a foot-long piece of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond.

A short look at CoeLux, an artificial skylight that recreates the scattering process that makes the sky look blue, producing a convincing illusion of distant sun and depth.

Tom Scott tours the rotating room artificial gravity facility at Brandeis University's Graybiel lab. It shows how humans cope with rotation-based gravity and the odd effects such as Coriolis forces.

Nature video showing MIT researchers flying the first plane with no moving parts, powered by an ion drive that creates an ionic wind from high-powered electrodes. The 5m-wide craft flies across a sports hall.

Applied Science shows how telecentric and hypercentric optics differ from normal lenses, producing no or negative perspective. The video builds a telecentric system from a Fresnel lens and demonstrates a lens that can see around objects.

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.

Veritasium explores how synchronization arises spontaneously in nature, with metronomes, fireflies and bridges, drawing on Steven Strogatz's work on chaos and complexity.

Scott Manley uses a realistically scaled Kerbal Space Program setup to show why dropping something into the Sun is far harder than it sounds. It demonstrates the need to cancel orbital velocity.

Steve Mould shows that LEDs and solar panels are both diodes made from semiconductors, so a solar panel can emit light and an LED can generate electricity. He demonstrates a small solar panel lighting up.

A five-minute demonstration of the Shepard tone, an audio illusion made from octave-separated tones that makes pitch seem to rise endlessly without ever getting higher.

Peter Sripol builds and flies an RC aeroplane whose wings are rotating KFC buckets, using the Magnus effect (Flettner rotors) for lift. It is a hobbyist experiment in unconventional aerodynamics.

Footage of Richard Box's art installation in which fluorescent tubes light up in the ground under high voltage power lines, showing the electric fields they produce.

A four-minute demo of the greenhouse effect showing how increased carbon dioxide raises temperature. It uses a simple setup that is dramatic and easy to understand.

Physics Girl shows a vortex phenomenon (a falaco soliton) that can be reproduced in a pool on a sunny day. Two vortices are created with plates and made visible with food coloring.

Veritasium shows an experiment from Prof. Dan Lathrop's lab with a spinning sphere of molten sodium, used to study how turbulent convection in Earth's core generates a magnetic field. It is a short demonstration of dynamo physics.

Dave Jones of EEVblog demonstrates that a frequency counter can detect gravity through the 2g tipover effect on quartz crystal oscillators. He shows the reading shift as the instrument's orientation changes.

A short clip from a Richard Feynman interview in which he explains fire, describing how burning wood releases sunlight stored by the tree, which built itself mostly from air. It showcases his curiosity and plain-spoken explanations.

DIY Perks builds a realistic artificial sun for dark winters, using a powerful water-cooled LED, a satellite dish reflector for near-parallel rays, and a scattering layer to mimic the blue sky. The video explains the optics behind why most lamps do not look like sunlight and shows the build and its results.

PBS Space Time argues that the speed of light is better understood as the speed of causality, the universal limit on how fast cause and effect propagate. Light travels at that speed because it is massless, but the limit itself is a property of spacetime.

Veritasium explains why the one-way speed of light has never been measured, only the round-trip speed, since measuring it requires synchronized clocks that assume the answer. It explores the implications for relativity.

ScienceClic explains why the rubber sheet analogy for general relativity is misleading and offers a new visualization that includes the curvature of time and shows gravity as motion through curved spacetime.

Veritasium explains magnetism as a consequence of special relativity. Length contraction of moving charges makes a current in a wire attract or repel a nearby moving charge.

Veritasium argues that electric energy is carried by fields around the wires rather than by electrons moving through them, using a thought experiment with a large circuit.

Sean Carroll introduces his video series on the biggest ideas in physics, such as symmetry, space and matter, as informal discussions with follow-up Q&A videos. This is the short opening video of the series.