Demonstrating the magic of physics

SALT LAKE CITY — At the University of Utah, Adam Beehler shrink-wrapped a student and levitated another with a leaf blower. It was all part of a day’s work for the university’s physics demonstrator. Beehler manages the school’s large collection of demonstration equipment, runs demonstrations for instructors and teaches a class of his own, entitled The Way Things Work, a kind of physics show-and-tell. The concepts he demonstrates are old – one law that predicts the effects of electromagnetism dates back to 1834 – and don’t really change, but he says the job doesn’t get old. “No, I like the concept so much this doesn’t get boring to me,” Beehler said.To demonstrate the pressure of our atmosphere, he puts a student (all but his head) in a plastic bag and evacuates the air inside. With the pressure of the atmosphere pressing down on him, the students cannot move. To show that pressure in a confined liquid is transferred throughout, aka “Pascal’s Principle”, a student on a leaf-blower-powered hovercraft floats across the classroom floor.The semester ends with his big finale. Also, Sprach Zarathustra (also the theme from “2001 – A Space Odyssey”) plays. Beehler holds two fluorescent tubes and inches them towards a large Van de Graaff generator until they attract loud, crackling bolts of purple lightning, hundreds of thousands of volts, lighting up the bulbs and turning the teacher into a modern-day Zeus. The demonstration generates laughter and a round of applause. “Sometimes the students will think, ‘Oh, that’s magic.’ Physics seems like magic. It’s just magic of the universe. It just naturally works that way,” he said.

(Special thanks to figure skater and University of Utah student Andee Lyons, who started the school’s new figure skating team, for demonstrating the conservation of angular momentum for us.)

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