Cool Science Experiment!!

For science, CLB has been exploring force and motion. He's read about Sir Isaac Newton a bit, and watched a short biography about him on biography.com. But reading and watching about force and motion only goes so far. I wanted to show CLB how this all fit together. I was absolutely delighted when I found this experiment on the blog, ordinary life magic. Although the potential for mess was high, we just couldn't pass it up!

The idea behind this experiment involves Newton's First Law of Motion...an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. CLB knows these words, but he hasn't seen them in action! First, I set up the experiment, without telling him what we were doing. I was going for the WOW factor here, and man, does this experiment have a lot of WOW. So here's the set up:

The potential for mess here is HUGE!!!

Yes, that is a RAW egg perched on top of a small paper tube, on top of a tin pie plate, on top of a glass of water! And guess what I did? I knocked the pan away with a mighty karate chop! POW! Before I did that, I asked CLB what he thought would happen. His hypothesis was that there would be a mighty mess to go along with the mighty karate chop! But what actually happened was:

YEEESSS!

The egg fell straight down into the water, which broke it's fall so it didn't break!!! I have to admit, I was a nervous wreck doing this. I really wanted it to work, but I wasn't so sure about my karate chop capabilities! This experiment works because the karate chop knocks over the pie plate and the lip of the plate hits the paper tube, knocking it over in turn. However the egg hasn't been knocked over (acted upon) by either my hand, the pie plate, or the paper tube. Since there isn't a force acting on it except gravity, it falls straight down to the water. 

You should note that you absolutely have to line the paper tube up with the opening to the glass so that the egg falls into the glass and not on the counter. And you need to make sure to hit only the pie plate with your karate chop. If you hit the glass and the pie plate you do end up with a mess, as CLB found out when he tried it:

Egg down! Egg down! Actually, the egg did crack but not too badly. Cleaning up the water was more of a pain than the egg!

If I were you, I would definitely give this one a try! Hey, what's a bit of mess compared to showing your kids how cool you and science are!?! But, just in case you're worried about it and just can't bring yourself to try it, CLB took some video of our third attempt of this. It's a bit shaky (he is only 8, so his videotaping skills need a bit of work), but in 45 seconds you can see exactly what happens and how exciting it all is to Crazy Little Kids!