Curiouser and curiouser…
There’s a lot of science that requires a huge amount of money, resources and dedication and I love it — experiments like the Large Hadron Collider are incredibly exciting and revealing. But you don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of time or money to uncover beautiful and amazing things about the world.
The seven simple science suggestions listed here are cheap, quick and pretty straightforward — but they are also opportunities to be curious and ask questions.
1. Going beyond the infinite, with milk
Pour milk into a plate and add paint or food colouring. Then dip a cotton bud (or Q-tip) in detergent. Now touch the surface of the liquid with the detergent soaked cotton bud and see what happens.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey when Dave passes through the star gate, there’s a section where you see nebula expanding and exploding — they were slow motion shots of paints and chemicals behaving in a very similar way.
Is the effect different with different types of milk? What detergents work best?
2. Generate your own power
Before electricity was scientifically understood it was just a curiosity, something for parlour tricks—many of which demonstrated the effects of static electricity. As every kid knows, you can rub a balloon on your hair or clothing to generate charge and then stick it to a wall or make your hair stand on end. It can even make objects move and bend water. We found by accident that you can create a surprising amount of static charge by wearing polyester and bouncing on a trampoline ↓.
What can you find to generate static electricity with? What can you make happen with that static charge?
3. Making waves
If you’d like to see how waves travel (propagate) then get a slinky. Hold each end on a surface and then stretch it out a bit. Then move one hand sharply in and out, in line with the slinky, and you’ll see that movement travel along it as a pulse (a longitudinal wave). You’re seeing the movement of energy through a medium; you provide the energy, the pulse is how that energy travels, and the slinky is the medium it travels through.
If you move one end of the slinky up and down, perpendicular to the line of the slinky, you can create a waveform that travels along the slinky (a transverse wave).
Your seeing how all waves work (although surface waves behave a bit differently), including waves through water, sound waves in air, and electromagnetic waves including light.
But light is a bit different… light can travel in a vacuum so appears to propagate through nothing, there’s no medium. So for light there’s energy and it’s moving through space, but it seems like there’s no slinky. It’s really weird.
Can you find other materials and objects that you can propagate a wave through? Can you find ways of making invisible waves visible (like in Jurrasic Park when you see a T-Rex coming through the ripples in a glass of water)?
4. Chain reaction
Stacking up causes and effects to form a chain reaction is loads of fun. It’s something you can do on you own but is much quicker when there’s a group of you.
Decide the route for your chain reaction, then split your group into smaller groups, giving each a section where they can do what they like. The only rule is that each section has to connect from the previous and on to the next.
If after setting off your chain reaction it gets stuck then use a ‘magic hand’ (which all participants agree to un-see) to give things a little nudge.
At the simplest level, this is just a lot of fun. But these actions and reactions make use of many different kinds of physical forces and interactions, depending on the materials use, their properties and how they’re brought together.
This is also an exercise in entropy where you start with a relatively ordered state (low entropy) that to moves towards a more disordered one (high entropy), like the universe. The universe at the very beginning is thought to have been in a very low entropy state and no-one can really explain why; like a clock that was wound up tight, or a chain reaction ready to be set off…
How many people can you get involved in making a chain reaction? What materials do you have to hand that you could use? What physical forces were involved?
5. Paper tiger?
Paper can be much stronger than you might expect. There’s a Japanese architect who has built his career on it. This strength can be revealed through a few simple folds, as in the pic below. The same slip of ordinary white paper without any folds has no rigidity, and would struggle to support a fly. This principle is what gives corrugated cardboard its lightness and strength.
How far can you push the strength of paper? What span can you bridge? What loads can you make it carry?
6. The Moiré effect gives you something for nothing
The Moiré effect can be seen when repeating lines or patterns overlap and interfere with each other. These interference patterns can be sinuous, organic-looking and rich—often much more so that the original patterns they spring from. There’s something really magical about this effect.
You can create your own moiré by printing a simple graphic pattern on a sheet of paper. Now copy the same pattern on to a sheet of clear acetate. Place the acetate on top of the paper and slowly shift or rotate it and the moiré effect will appear.
Interference patterns are fascinating and have been used to reveal amazing things such as the fact that fundamental particles are not really particles, but both waves and particles simultaneously. It’s weird and amazing.
How does changing the level of density and detail in your graphic patterns affect the moiré effects you see? Can you find moiré patterns in the world around you?
7. Raisins to be cheerful
This is so simple. Just pour lemonade into a glass and add raisins. They sink to the bottom as you’d expect. Then… they float back up again. Then they sink again. It’s mesmerising.
I think the effect comes from the bubbles that propagate around the raisins, making them more buoyant. When they rise to the surface some of the bubbles pop and they become less buoyant and sink back down.
Raisins seem to be the perfect size and weight for this and I guess their wrinkly surface helps.
Can you find other things that behave in the same way? Does the same thing work with other fizzy drinks?
There are lots of people and places encouraging kids to be curious and helping them ask questions about the world—here are a three:
Institute of Imagination
They describe themselves as being a cross between ‘a community centre, a laboratory, a studio, a gallery, science centre and a museum’. They demonstrate how education for kids can be hands on and unconcerned with the boundaries between disciplines—I love what they do.
Royal Institution
The Royal Institution has an amazing past, it was founded in 1799 with the aim of teaching science to the general public. Today they help kids get into science with all whole range of stuff including: their annual Christmas lectures; activity days where kids can do their own experiments; and this fantastic set of videos.
The Science Museum, Wonderlab
This is a new, hands on gallery in London’s Science Museum. “Fuel your imagination and immerse yourself in a world of wonder at the newest and most spectacular interactive gallery in the world.”
