His Holiness posts a YouTube video of a cartoon explanation of double-slit interference. Apparently this was made by the "What the Bleep" people, and it sort of shows in the gosh-wow tone that shades toward mysticism at the end.
As always with YouTube, though, the real fun is in looking at the related videos, which includes some total crap (a video talking about how to explain traditional Chinese medicine with quantum mechanics), but also this charming home demonstration from Down Under:
Fire and science: two great tastes that taste great together.
And, as long as I'm embedding things, a video using ferrofluids and rotating magnetic fields to make patterns that look like some trippy animation from the sixties:
It's really remarkable how easy it would be to waste hours poking around with this stuff.
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Nice video, but is that really a school-worthy explanation of the physics behind a hot air baloon? I guess the principles are the same...what is your take on it? You don't comment on the actual demo in the post.
I think the explanation given for what's going on in the demo is probably pretty accurate. The fire heats the air inside the bag, but it doesn't lift off until most of the mass of the bag has been consumed. If you look at it in detail, there are probably some steep thermal gradients involved, which may play a role-- the air at the very bottom probably doesn't heat significantly until the bag has burned most of the way down-- but I suspect that the basic physics is what she says: eventually, the upward force of the hot air is enough to lift the reduced mass, so it flies up into the air.
Is it really a good analogy to a hot air balloon? Probably not, but it is eye-catching, and involves enough of the same physics that it would probably work well as a demo.