Have You Ever Experienced an Eye-Opening Experiment?

[heman]

Is there any amazing experiment that you have done and which gave you kind of "aha" feelings and opened your eyes...

Like in my first year we did a experiment on helmholtz coils and we finally saw beam of electrons in a dark room whose radius was increasing..this was Physics Experiment..But i am referring to any kind...which you might have observed.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I once had a guy about fall over when I showed him how adding light [opening the second slot] in a diffraction experiment caused some lit areas on the screen to go dark. Funny enough, he knew about wave theory but didn't believe it.

I once got too close to a desktop experiment and took about 25,000 volts up the nose. That was a real aha moment! Made some funny faces too...

 

[scott1]

I once digustic a squash bug at home with homemade equipment.Smelled REALLY bad so ofcource I did my bedroom

 

[Orefa]

As a kid I stuffed home-made gunpowder in a metal case open at one end to create a solid rocket aimed towards the river. I lit the fuse and took a few steps back, it exploded quite violently, miraculously leaving me unharmed. "AH-HA! I could have died!" was my revelation. I never played with this again.

 

[scott1]

As a kid I stuffed home-made gunpowder in a metal case open at one end to create a solid rocket aimed towards the river. I lit the fuse and took a few steps back, it exploded quite violently, miraculously leaving me unharmed. "AH-HA! I could have died!" was my revelation. I never played with this again.

That reiminds me when I was about 5 and I use to mix chemicals in the kitchkin toghter and usaullay dirt.I didn't know what secientfic method was but I just mixed radom togther.I didn't realize how dangeours it was...

 

[Manchot]

That reiminds me when I was about 5 and I use to mix chemicals in the kitchkin toghter and usaullay dirt.I didn't know what secientfic method was but I just mixed radom togther.I didn't realize how dangeours it was...

That reminds me of when I was eight and I was doing the same thing. Unfortunately, I mixed ammonia and bleach together, and ended up spending a month in the hospital.

Wow, I'm a now I'm just lying for no reason.

 

[mrjeffy321]

As a kid I stuffed home-made gunpowder in a metal case open at one end to create a solid rocket aimed towards the river. I lit the fuse and took a few steps back, it exploded quite violently, miraculously leaving me unharmed. "AH-HA! I could have died!" was my revelation. I never played with this again.

I had a very similar experience happen to me (1 year ago today in fact), a very eye opening experience, or in my case, eye closing. A piece of brick shrapnel hit me in the eye, knocking me down and causing the whole area to turn black and swell up so I could not see. It was quite eye opening, analyzing the results of the experiment, me and three other people could have died; things have never been quite the same, that was defiantly an “aha” moment.

 

[scott_alexsk]

When I was six, I took the television annetna, and stuck the metal plug in one side of the socket. I made sure to hold onto both sides of the annetna with both hands (so I could complete the circuit ). It wasn't really an "aha" moment but a "little kid scream" moment.
-Scott

 

[turbo]

I once got too close to a desktop experiment and took about 25,000 volts up the nose. That was a real aha moment! Made some funny faces too...

I built a Jacob's ladder with a variac and a Ford ignition coil and some copper rods. The physics teacher asked me to explain the operation of the apparatus, and I did so in a live demonstration. Unfortulately, somebody asked me how to explain how the arc climbed the gap, despite shorter gap-lengths across which to propagate in the lower sections, and I pointed my finger at the arc. The arc ceased immedialty, entered my index finger, and coursed through my body and exited through my butt to a large rivet in the lab-stool, which happened to be placed such that one metal leg was sitting on the metal cover grounded to the school's electical system. OW! High school can have its high moments. That was not one of them.

 

[rachmaninoff]

Late one rainy afternoon, in an organic chem lab - there was fog condensing inside my plastic goggles, I was wiping that off every few minutes. You can get glass containers very dry if you rinse them with acetone, because it's very water-soluble and then evaporates very fast. So, I thought, why not get all the condensation out with acetone? So I did.

And that was how my third pair of safety goggles passed on to goggle heaven.

 

[heman]

I once had a guy about fall over when I showed him how adding light [opening the second slot] in a diffraction experiment caused some lit areas on the screen to go dark. Funny enough, he knew about wave theory but didn't believe it.

I once got too close to a desktop experiment and took about 25,000 volts up the nose. That was a real aha moment! Made some funny faces too...

Ivan the same thing was with me...
i didn't ever believed whatever i was taught until i saw them really happening towards my eyes..

 

[Alkatran]

Seeing angular momentum demonstrated as a spinning wheel supported like so:

     |
  |  |   <- rope
--|--|
  |  <- wheel

not just flopping down as expected made pretty much everyone in my class go "holy _#&%"