Yesterday marked the end of Langdon Street Cafe's second annual Geek Week festival, and as a part of the ultra-nerdy festivities they invited me to bring my most favorite demonstrations and show them off during the "Show and Tell" section. That was pretty fun.
I had a section called "Things that spin", in which I did a bunch of tricks with a bike wheel with a handle (similar to this). Gosh, there's so much deep deep physics you can do with very simple devices!
I made a double-conic shape roll "uphill" on its own. I talked about frisbees and bernoulli's principle.
Later I had a section on electricity, for which we tried to get kids hair to stand up by touching a Van De Graaf generator. We put a stack of tin plates on top of it and watched them throw themselves upwards and outwards. We put rice crispies at the top and watched them dance and jump off making a fabulous mess. :)
But, the highlight for the cafe and for myself as well was prior to "Show and Tell", a section billed as "Quantum Mechanics 101", during which I gave a basic introduction to three key experiments that people should be at least aware of if they wanted to get into QM. Specifically those are:
Young's Double Slit Experiment
The Measurement Problem (along with Schrodinger's Cat)
Entanglement, the EPR Paradox, and Aspect's Experiment
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