Welcome to the Extreme Science Challenge. My name is Raymond Penner. I'm a physics professor here
at Vancouver Island University and I also run a charity called Science To All - hence the very
cool t-shirt. The charity does science outreach events for both schools here in Canada and also in
Africa. Now over the course of 10 videos, we have put together demonstrations. These are demonstrations that we do for classes
here at VIU and also demonstrations that we do with the Extreme Science show. Many of them are
are very exciting hopefully for you and you enjoy them. Now for the challenge part. In each video,
there'll be letters placed and these letters will form words. In each video, the letters will form
one or two words and you'll be told at the beginning of the video how many letters and
how many words they should form. Over the 10 videos you're going to collect all these words
and these words make up a quote. Now this is a quote from a famous scientist, so the challenge is
to determine what the quote is and who said it. So good luck and now let's look at the first video.
So this is a classic bed and nails demo. There's no tricks. No tricks are needed here.
These are real sharp nails. You put your hand on them, they're sharp.
Now the key is when I lie down on them, I weigh almost 200 pounds and i make contact
with maybe around 200 nails, so each nail has to only hold up one pound. So that's not so bad.
It would be like if we put a nail here and put one pound on it, it'd poke in a bit, but it's not going to
puncture the skin. So the key is to have lots of nails. If I had 10 nails, big problems.
But we want to up the ante a little bit. We want to make it a nail sandwich, so i'm gonna
lie down there and then they're gonna place this nail board on top of me. So let's do that first.
This is a very cool demo. A very well known one - breaking a wine glass with sound. Now
how it works is the following - the glass has a natural frequency of vibration
and you can get that just by clicking it. You can hear it. I have a speaker here. If I play a sound
which is exactly the same frequency and the frequency of that glass is 559 hertz exactly
so the sound wave is at 559 hertz, it's going to make the glass vibrate and if i turn up the sound
loud enough it's gonna make it vibrate so much the glass will break .Now we can also show you
what's happening in the glass as the sound is on looking at it in slow motion so let's take a look.