It's Rocket Science! with Professor Chris Bishop

rocket science Good Afternoon and welcome to the Department of Chemistry, Welcome to the Cambridge Science Festival, And Welcome to this lecture on Rocket Science Now, every Rocket that has ever flown, whether its a small firework rocket, or whether its a giant rocket carrying people to the moon every rocket is based on one simple principle. So i thought i'd begin this lecture by demonstrating that principle So this a beautiful reproduction, in miniature of a Napoleonic Canon. But its a working model And its actually capable of firing a live round: A Half inch diameter Lead Cannon Ball Today we wont fire a live round, but im going to fire a blank round and when we do, i want you to observe what happens to the cannon Now the cannon's really just a tube thats closed on this end (left side) and open at this end (right side) This is called a muzzle and theres a small hole we call a "touch hole" that we use to transmit fire to the main charge So im going to begin by taking a small slow burning fuse And placing that in the "touch hole" Then were going to charge this with gunpowder So the gunpowder is in this nice powder horn the way this works is: I put my finger over the brass nozzle, I press the valve and tip it upside down And powder trickles into that brass spout So I'm measuring a precise quantity of gunpowder And I release the valve and turn it upside... right way up again and we have a measured quantity of gunpowder in the spout So I'll place that into the barrel of the cannon and I thought is since its "Science Week" we'll use a double dose *audience laughs* Here's a double dose of gunpowder going into the cannon So that's the gunpowder, In the barrel; I'll put this safely out of the way Now to keep the gunpowder in the barrel and against the fuse were going to use a bit of wadding so this is some fireproof wadding which I'm going to put into the, into the muzzle of the cannon and then use this "Ram Rod" to pack the wadding and the gunpowder tight up against the fuse. Now at this point we would put our cannon ball in but were not going to do that today so instead, we'll, we'll simulate that by adding a bit more wadding so I'm going to put some more wadding into the barrel and again just pack that down and then finally, to, uh, to stop the ball rolling out, as it were, we'd use a bit more wadding. So, why not, lets do a bit more wadding. *audience laughs* It is the science festival after all. Okay, so we've got this wadding nicely pack down. Our cannon, uh will be loaded, and it's now ready to fire. So I'm going to light the fuse from where I'm standing, it's quite noisy, so I'm going to be covering my ears; if you're near the front, you may wish to do the same.

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 2,799,380

Rating: 4.891067 out of 5

Keywords: Science, Ri, Royal Institution, Science Communication, Education, lecture, physics, rockets, event, cambridge, science, festival, chris, bishop, explosion, demonstration, demo, family, fireworks, talk, flight, aeroplane, Christopher Bishop (Computer Scientist)

Id: HESOat2iPzU

Length: 58min 4sec (3484 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 03 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Knotix]

This was phenomenal. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[u/wcg66]

Just great. I'm adding this to our rocketry group webpage.