Watch How Things Fall In Space

in today's video we're building a taller vacuum chamber so we can do some experiments with dropping stuff in zero atmosphere Nate he went shopping yes and you found a very large piece of acrylic tubing I did it's six inches in diameter and about three feet long we over the years have done a lot of cool experiments with vacuum chambers we've had some very cool results and some stuff that looked amazing but there have been some experiments we haven't really been able to try because our vacuum chamber was only 12 inches tall this should make a much taller vacuum chamber and let us show off some of the effects of a vacuum in a much cooler way here's the basic idea we've got a tall clear tube and we're going to turn this into a vacuum chamber so we can experiment what it would be like to drop things in space but with gravity so you were telling me that this is something that kind of baffled scientists for years and was finally able to be proven on the moon of all places that's right it was theorized for a while that in a vacuum really lightweight things would still fall the same speed as their denser counterparts taking say a feather and comparing it to dropping a hammer on Earth of course they're gonna fall out vastly different speeds Galileo's tests notwithstanding although gravity does pull on everything at the same rate a feather is so spread out and so lightweight for its size it's not dense so he catches air and the air resistance slows it down a lot and so that's why a feather will drop very slowly compared to something the same weight like a coin that will drop much faster but let's say we remove air resistance there is no air resistance than that feather should plummet just the same way that a coin or a ball bearing or a rock will fall and this was finally able to be proved on the surface of the Moon someone took a feather and a hammer and then they just drop them both at the same time it was on the moon so there was only one and so we want to try recreating a little bit of that unfortunately we don't have the budget go to the moon but we do have the budget to make a taller vacuum chamber so that is what we're doing today so this is going to be our chamber it's about 1/8 inch of walls with our standard vacuum chamber we use a glass jar from Walmart and using proto Kutty we made a seal that let our lid fit on there this does not have a bottom to it it's a tube that goes all the way through and so what we need to do is make a proto putty seal for both the top and the bottom we've got a couple of plates here a very thick acrylic this is the same stuff we use to make our lids before and then I also went ahead made these rings it turns out that 1/8 inch acrylic is not quite strong enough with a 3-foot to withstand the negative pressure of a vacuum at our altitude that's 14 or 15 psi externally pressing in on all sides of this and while it held up for a while once it really started pulling most of the air out it was too much pressure and started sort of collapsing itself so I've got three rings that just fit nicely into our acrylic tube and those are just going to be used as supports we'll have one near the top one near the bottom one near the middle and hopefully that will just keep everything from collapsing we just have those probably lightly glued in place they really don't move very much and that's just how they like it so let's mix up a couple of batches of proto putty and then we can make the cap and the foot all right after you've got your silicone one we add food coloring food coloring is a necessary step not because it has to have color but because it has to have water this stuff cures with moisture food coloring is mostly water so we're gonna add in this much we're probably gonna try and get about a teaspoon of coloring into it it is variable how much you put in it doesn't take much to get thicker but with more of it it's yours faster and we kind of wanted to cheer a little faster so we're going for a good amount of color here and to be clear it doesn't necessarily have to be food coloring you could use water you can it's harder to tell when it's fully mixed with water and it just doesn't look as fun it's just white which you want white then have at it no food coloring just water all right now I'm just gonna start stirring this in time to start adding cornstarch stuff puts off acetic acid it's like vinegar it's very intense not terribly Pleasant I highly recommend somewhere with good circulation I prefer to do this in a cup with a good stir stick this cup could be a little bit sturdier it's kind of hard to hold on to while I'm stirring sometimes but I find this is the easiest least messy way but be aware this is a messy process it's guaranteed gonna make a mess you can't really avoid that very well just be ready to clean up afterward basically your goal is to just keep adding cornstarch more and more until it stops being sticky or at least until it almost stops being sticky so as I'm stirring two things are happening one the cornstarch is getting mixed in and that's gonna make it less sticky but also it is starting to cure the food coloring is mixed into the silicone and it is beginning the curing process and as it does that it becomes a little bit more rigid and a little bit less sticky as well and so you're kind of gonna get to a point where it stops sticking as much and we do want a nice smooth mix and I'm gonna try and do that with the knife but I often end up just having to use my hands anyway just why wear gloves when I do this because like I said very messy process but I like to at least get it somewhat stirred in before I move on to doing with my hands otherwise it just sticks immediately and Sibley and you can't even mix it up anymore basically like if you were gonna really really really be me into some bread dough that you are making lightly squeeze it on everywhere we want plenty on top of the ridge because when we put the lid on it is gonna squish it we don't want to squish it all the way down and like cut through the proto cutty press this on and make sure that smashes down everywhere if you want it to flat in contact with the acrylic just bring it up a little bit on the sides to give a bigger surface area and this that's pretty fast doesn't it yeah usually it depends on how much liquid you put in with the amount I put in I suspect this should go fairly quickly we maybe want to wait for five minutes before we start the next batch this is going to be the lid and we do want to be able to fit our vacuum gauge onto here as well as the point where it pulls the air out so we need to add a hole and threads that will allow our vacuum pump attachments to connect to it this is a kit that's 1/4 inch 18 NPT that's referring to the size and thread count of the tap here our proto PA is cured so now we can just break the seal here and go for it there you go got it it's a good sign there is a good contact with all the proto putty going around perfectly smooth oh and that still smells like proto buddy that's gonna be there for days all right so now we need to take the rings and you probably can't fit it in with the proto putting Usul on there you gotta pop that off I have one ring down here near the middle and honestly I think even just a couple of tiny pieces that taper and all these or do you prefer to glue them I like tape just in case we need to take them out later and I think you're right it doesn't take much just a couple little strips is gonna hold it in place they they're almost held in place just from the fit but we don't want that chance of something we clean even a little bit when we're trying to get a vacuum going not yet it doesn't you got it all right pulling low pressure that is a very lovely vacuum tower we've got we were testing the feather versus the penny before I'm just gonna try using the magnet instead of the penny like magnet and a penny it's too complicated this way I can just lift straight up I don't have to try and twist it spin it anything so fancy I can just lift and it should drop straight down let's give that a shot one two three beautiful still hit the side but you know what are you gonna do this is gonna be one of those things that I'm gonna see it I'm going to watch it happen in front of my own eyes and I'm not gonna believe it now I should point out that the vacuum pump we're using is not perfect we're not going to get a 100% vacuum there will be some amount of air still in our vacuum tower however it's a pretty good vacuum it's very very low pressure with very little air in there so I'm pretty confident that we'll get at least a decent result if not a perfect result 3 2 1 [Music] here we've got some cornstarch on a plastic lid and there is a reason we're testing this I was reading a book called Artemis about a station of people who live on the moon and there is a description about how something sort of exploded or impacted with moon dust and it you know dust got thrown up into the air but then to talk about how that dust went in the air and then settled away and it had never occurred to me that a dust cloud wouldn't stay on the moon it just dissipates because even though there's low gravity there's also no air on the surface so even dust is going to quickly relatively quickly fall down to the ground at 1/6 the acceleration of what on earth but still longer than if you have air resistance holding it up so I wanted to see if we could recreate something like that we don't have any moon dust unfortunately instead we've got cornstarch which makes a pretty good dust cloud and we've got it on top of a plastic lid to give a little bit of bounce and the idea is we just want to get that dust to fly up into the air and we're gonna do a test here on the table and then we're gonna try the same thing in our vacuum tower to see what the result is something falling down impacting our dust toss sniff in the air and see if it will settle back down quickly or if it looks the same we've got this little magnetic ball bearing sort of thing we're just gonna drop it down onto our lid and see what the desk crowd looks like 3 2 and we got a big poof went up in the air and it did settle it didn't take forever to sell but we want to see if there's a difference in the result inside our vacuum tower to simulate being on the moon [Music] checking the slow-motion footage though it does seem like we have a lot more particles just staying and hanging in the air and that was even so our magnet actually hit this ring on the way down so it didn't have quite the same force but even with the lesser force it seems to have made more of a dust cloud oh that's the cloud that's what doesn't happen in a vacuum that was a cloud up to like here that just not sure how I wonder how much it can be visible on the slow motion but in real life there is definitely a difference Marc's got it on 8 cam 2 you can just need a poof like and it's still puffs of dust that just slowed slowly fell back down versus like a you more said it yeah you said it looked more like water and I think you're right it just it behaved a little a lot more like water as it flew through the air which I guess there could even be either effective air resistance when it's going up in the first place if there is none then it's just gonna stick together kind of even if there is air resistance then it's gonna like hit it and push apart a little bit so it could be the behavior of dust in a vacuum that could be probably write a whole PhD thesis on that there you go guys summer project guys we've got a vacuum tower it's super cool to play with and it simulates the lack of atmosphere and outer space and it's tall so we can drop more things in it if you've got ideas of things you'd like to see us put in it let us know down in the comments as always we've always got more for you to see click that box over the top and we'll see you in the next one talk to you then

Channel: The King of Random

Views: 1,014,883

Rating: 4.8710518 out of 5

Keywords: vacuum chamber, gravity in space, vacuum chamber tower, vacuum tube, pressure experiments, how do things act in no gravity, rock and feather gravity experiment, nasa, moon landing, space experiments, vacuum chamber experiments, diy vacuum chamber, make your own vacuum chamber, physics, sciece, chemistry, STEM, bowling ball, magnets, proto putty, thekingofrandom, tkor, grant thompson, nate, calli, gravitational force, air pressure experiments

Id: FtFMUb5zafs

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 18 2019