TEN WAYS TO WIN WITH ESPECIALLY SNEAKY SCIENCE
AMAZING SCIENCE FACTS
• A teaspoonful of a neutron star would weigh a colossal 6 billion tons.
• Travelling at the speed of light, the journey to the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda, would take an astonishing 2 million years.
• If you were able to remove all the empty space in our atoms, the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.
• A split second after the Big Bang the entire universe was the size of a pea.
• In the time it took you to read this sentence, a million billion neutrinos from the sun have passed through your body.
A NOVEL BET
Take two books and weave the pages together. Now challenge your friend to pull the books apart by holding the spines and tugging hard. No matter how hard they try, they will fail and you will win the bet.
Each page of the book has friction against a page above and below it. Since the pages in most books are surprisingly rough, and the combined surface area across all of the pages is huge, a massive amount of friction is created and it’s nearly impossible to pull the two books apart by hand. But that is only part of the story – a few years ago a team of French and Canadian physicists discovered a second principle at work. After experimenting with hundreds of carefully prepared test books they realized that the interleaving pages are at a slight angle from the spine. And this matters because when you try to pull the books apart, the pages squeeze together and this massively increases the friction between them.
Without friction, life would be very different. For a start, all knots would automatically untie, cars would remain stationary because their tyres wouldn’t grip the road, and everything would slip through your fingers. What’s more, walking would be extremely slow and dangerous, and standing on even the slightest of slopes would become a highly treacherous business. On the upside, flights would probably become much, much cheaper, in part because reduced air drag would result in lower fuel consumption, but also because the planes would have no way of stopping when they landed.
A BALANCING ACT
For this bet you need four glasses and three table knives. Place three of the glasses in a triangle, and then challenge your friend to balance three knives on the glasses in such a way that the knives can support the weight of the fourth glass.
To win the bet, place the first and second knives like this …
… and then place the third knife under the first knife and over the second knife.
The knives will then form a solid platform, and you can balance the fourth glass on it!
BLOW IN, BLOW OUT
This bet involves a bottle and a pen lid.
Place the lid in the neck of the bottle, ensuring that the opening of the lid points towards the bottom of the bottle.
Now ask your friend to blow the lid into the bottle. They will blow into the bottle and the lid will come flying out!
As you blow the air into the bottle it moves around the pen lid and forces out the air in the bottle. The air leaving the bottle then pushes out the pen lid. If you use a plastic bottle, though, and make some holes in the side of the bottle, it will be easy to blow the lid inside it.
PITCH PERFECT
Balance two matches on the rim of a glass. Challenge your friend to make the matches fall into the glass, but without touching the objects, blowing on them, or knocking on the table.
To win the bet, place a second wine glass next to the first one, wet your finger, and rub the rim of the second wine glass until it resonates. The sound will make the matches fall into the wine glass!
Make sure that you hold the second wine glass firmly on the tabletop.
Why does the bet work? When you hold one end of a ruler on the edge of a desk and hit the other end, the ruler will naturally move back and forth at a certain rate. This is the ruler’s resonant frequency. It’s the same with your finger and the glass. As your finger moves around the rim of the glass it sticks and slides. When you get the movement just right the glass molecules vibrate at their natural frequency and the glass produces the ringing sound. And when this ringing sound hits the second glass it makes the molecules in the second glass move, and these vibrations dislodge the matches.
Of course, it may not feel as if your finger is stopping and starting. However, put some oil around the rim of the glass and your finger will move more smoothly, and the glass won’t ring. Conversely, putting some vinegar on your finger beforehand will help remove any dirt or oil, and make it much easier to produce the note.
In the nineteenth century this strange ringing effect was used to create an unusual musical instrument called the glass harmonica. Musicians would rub tuned glass bowls to create different notes, and it was widely believed that the eerie sounds made people go mad. It was later discovered that the musicians were marking the notes with poisonous lead paint, licking their fingers when they played, and therefore ingesting the paint. Saying that, the noise is really annoying.
FINGERTIP CONTROL
This bet involves two forks and a match. Bet your friend that you can balance all three objects on your fingertip. When they accept the bet, carefully push the match between the prongs of the two forks like this.
Although it seems impossible, you will then be able to balance the whole set-up on your fingertip.
COMPLETELY STATIC
Challenge your friend to balance a straw horizontally on a bottle and then make the straw spin without touching it or blowing on it.
After they have finished struggling, rub the straw on your shirt, balance it on the bottle, and then hold your finger close to the straw. Suddenly the straw will spin around!
Why does it work? Most objects are ‘electrically neutral’, which means they have an equal amount of positive and negative charge. When you rub the straw on your jumper the straw becomes negatively charged, and when you bring your hand close to the straw the negative charges in your hand are repelled, so your hand becomes positively charged. Unlike charges attract and so the straw moves towards your hand.
Many psychics have used this trick to convince people that they have the power to move objects with the power of their mind. See if you can fool your friends into thinking that you have psychokinetic powers and, if you are successful, ask them if they are interested in helping you form a small cult.
BED OF NAILS
Challenge your friend to place an inflated balloon on an upturned drawing pin without bursting the balloon.
To win the bet, place about twenty drawing pins on a table – amazingly, you can push a balloon onto the drawing pins without it bursting.
When there is only one drawing pin, the entire force on the balloon is focused on that one tip, and so the resulting pressure easily breaks through the rubber of the balloon. However, when you push the balloon onto lots of drawing pins, the same force is distributed across all of the tips and so there is not enough resulting pressure from any single pin to penetrate the rubber.
FULLY CHARGED
Show your friend an empty battery and a full battery, and challenge them to say which is which without putting the batteries into an appliance.
To win the bet, just drop the batteries on a table – the empty battery will bounce much higher than the full battery.
Researchers from Princeton University discovered that this strange phenomenon was caused by the way batteries produce power. The inside of a new battery consists of a layer of zinc wrapped around a brass core. As you use the battery, this zinc slowly changes to zinc oxide, and the links between the particles become more like springs. And it’s this springiness that gives the empty battery its bounce.
A TRICKY TOWER
This bet involves three straight-sided glasses. Challenge your friend to make a stack of glasses by balancing them on their rims.
To win the bet, simply stack them up like this.
THE HAPPENING NAPKIN
Take a paper napkin and make a tear on the left-hand side, ensuring that the tear stops about half an inch above the base of the napkin. Do exactly the same on the right-hand side of the napkin. Now ask your friend to hold the two corners of the napkin, and to pull the corners apart so that they are left with three separate pieces.
No matter how carefully they tear, they will always be left with two pieces.
Why does this work? The two tears will be slightly different lengths and so one tear will always give way before the other. The only way of winning the bet is to place the middle part of the napkin in your mouth and then pull on the ends!