Newtonian Physics tabletop demo

[DaveC426913]

Now I hope you understand. I made a picture so you can see what i mean visually:

http://www.xtendspin.ca/autres/explanation.jpg

You see the string stays the same, but the radius increases at each cycle due to inirtia. When repeating same thing but with a different initial radius and speed, but same period, you will see that A1=A2, B1=B2 and so on, of course ignoring air friction.

While I suspect that your experiment will demonstrate the phenomenon, it does not do so in a way that is so concise and clear as to wipe away any doubts in the minds of non-believers who are not scientifically minded.

The ruler experiment OTOH demonstrates it in the simplest possible way.

 

[DaveC426913]

How about just having something like a ruler with a hole in one end over a pin so that you can rotate it, and then you put a small disk like a piece from a game of checkers on the outside. You start to rotate the ruler slowly and once it is rotating fast enough you suddenly stop it, the disk will slide a small distance over the table and you can draw a line from the disk to the point where it originally sat on the ruler.

Yah. you know what? You're right. I'm thinking too big, with my bicycle wheel.

The ruler idea will work, with a few mods
- I can't have the ruler stop, because they'll naturally claim that, by stopping the ruler, I've eliminated the force. What I have to do is knock the poker chip off the rotating ruler.
- I have to make sure I eliminate any user involvment in the demo (i.e. I can't be manually spinning the ruler, it must spin freely.) or the demonstration of - what forces, how strong they are, and when they are acting - will be muddied.

 

[Werg22]

While I suspect that your experiment will demonstrate the phenomenon, it does not do so in a way that is so concise and clear as to wipe away any doubts in the minds of non-believers who are not scientifically minded.

The ruler experiment OTOH demonstrates it in the simplest possible way.

I admit that my experiment is too complicated to produce. But it can't be denied, it is a mathematical argument. The bucket experiment is the simpler that comes to my mind now...