It's just keeping itself right up. Check that out!
Hey what's up guys, I'm ThioJoe and as you saw in the intro
I'm gonna show you how to do a really cool and unusual trick.
With a fidget spinner that I think is gonna really impress some of your friends.
And I've not seen anyone else talk about this.
Because it's really unintuitive, it basically allows you to
make a fidget spinner defy gravity and hold itself up.
Almost like magic, and the only reason I knew about this
is because it's very similar to some demonstrations
I learned from physics classes, if you've ever taken that.
Using angular momentum- I'm not gonna get into that
boring stuff, unless you guys wanna hear about it
at the end I'll explain it.
But let me explain what you need to do to do this.
It's really actually not that difficult.
So obviously you're gonna need a fidget spinner.
And also, paperclips.
And the size of the paperclip is gonna depend on
the size of the hole in the middle of the fidget spinner.
And the third thing you're gonna need is some sort of string.
So either a rubber band, or ideally a regular string.
Or even, you could use something like headphone wire if you didn't have anything else
if you just wanna show your friends and you don't have anything else around
you can use that as well, I'll show you how to do it.
So the first thing you need to do is take out the sides of the spinner, the things you hold on.
So this will reveal the bearings.
And then you can just put those aside, cuz we don't need these right now.
We're not gonna need them.
We're not gonna be holding it ourselves.
The next thing you'll need is a paperclip, any one will do
as long as it's a little bit bigger than the hole in the middle of the fidget spinner.
If it fits right through with no friction at all, it's not gonna work.
And what you wanna do is look at the paperclip and find the side with the two loops.
Obviously every paperclip has one side with one loop and one side with two loops.
And you just wanna spread the two loops apart sideways.
So along the plane of the paperclip just enough where it almost looks like they're still overlapping a little bit
Not completely apart, just like that a little bit.
So then, you take the one loop side.
And you wanna kind of squeeze it together.
So you can fit it through.
The fidget spinner. And you'll see that,
this will kinda get stuck on this side.
So you need to squeeze
the edges in.
And then push everything through.
And that way,
The paperclip, you'll notice, at one point it's too big to go any further.
So we want that to happen 'cause we want this to be stuck.
So it's not gonna move around.
So, it'll kinda lock itself in place.
And either way you turn it, it's not gonna move around.
So that's what we're going for here.
So it'll look like this and that's all you have to do as far as the paperclip.
It's actually pretty easy.
And then the other thing you'll need to do is just take your string, or I'm just gonna use a rubber band in this example.
And tie it off on the edge with the one loop.
And you wanna just use anything that's very thin, like not a thick cable because it needs to be able to spin
very easily, if it doesn't spin very easily, like it's a really thick cable,
it's not gonna work and I'll show you why in a second.
So just tie that off.
And now...
It's just gonna hang like this!
So nothing magic about that, it's pretty obvious.
But, we're gonna make it stay up by itself, so how do we do that?
So believe it or not, you now have everything set up to do the trick, this is all you need to do.
And what you do, is just spin this thing as fast as you can.
And you probably need to blow on it to get a little bit more speed on it, so let me show you.
[PPPPPPPPFFFFFFFFFFFFFTTTTTTTTTTT]
The faster you go the better, it's going pretty good.
Hold it like that.
And wow, there it goes!
So it fell down a little bit, but you can see that it's not falling straight down at all.
And you can see how it kinda wants to turn around, and that's why you want this thing to be able, the string to be able to turn a little bit.
And obviously the faster you get it to go, the better it's gonna be able to stand up.
So you can see it kinda stays up for a little bit, whereas if you stop it...
You know, it just falls straight down but it doesn't do that when it's spinning.
Let me give it another go, see if I can get it going any faster.
[PPPPPPPPPPPPFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFTTTTTTTTTTTTTT]
Alright, it's going pretty good, I'm out of breath.
Alright, that's pretty good, see how it's staying up even more a little bit?
It's at an angle, but it's still not go-oh.
So, maybe you don't have a rubber band or you don't have strings, so let me show you what to do
with regular headphones, probably everyone has these you can use.
And, like I said before you want this to be very easy to spin, so,
You wanna kind of hold it as far away as you can.
If you hold it right here, you'll notice it's resistant to turning, and we saw how it wanted to turn,
if you stop it from being able to turn, it's gonna fall.
So, if you hold it from up higher it's easier to spin.
And if you use a very thin string, that's gonna be a lot easier to spin, even than a wire.
But we're gonna work with what we have, so let's tie this off again.
Alright, and clearly you don't want it to be sticking out and hitting this thing while it's spinning, so
kinda be careful of that.
Alright so now let's try with this.
[FFFFFFFPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPTTTTTTTTTTTTFPPPPFPP]
Going pretty good.
Hold it from pretty far up.
That's really- wow look at that one, that one worked really well.
And it hit the thing so it started to slow down, but you saw how well it was working at first.
Got that one going really well.
And I think that's probably because it was easier to spin than the rubber band
which would've been trying to turn backwards even more.
But now let's do something really cool to get it going really fast.
And I'm gonna use the rubber band again, cuz I don't wanna break the headphones.
Now how about instead of blowing on it ourselves, we use an electric duster.
This was not that expensive, I just bought it on Amazon.
And we can spin it up like this.
See how fast we can get this thing going now.
Let's give it a start.
[EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE]
Alright this thing is really cooking.
That's staying up real nice.
See if we can get it back up.
Even when I'm holding it, it still wants to turn.
You can see how much it's spun around, so it's tougher for it to spin if we...
spin it back it might go a little bit
Alright so it's started to slow down, but you saw how well it worked when you get it going really fast.
So that is basically the whole trick, and if you're wondering how it works, let me explain.
It's kinda difficult to explain without using too much math.
But I'll do my best, because it's a concept called angular momentum from physics.
And it's probably my favorite thing, I was a physics minor in college.
And angular momentum was my favorite throughout the whole thing, just cuz it's so weird!
As you saw, in this demonstration it can basically defy gravity.
Now, angular momentum, in a nutshell, is the basic idea that
if you spin something, it keeps wanting to spin, just like with regular momentum
if you hit something against another one, the momentum might be conserved
in certain collisions.
So the momentum from this one was transferred into the other one.
Except in this case, it wants to keep that momentum going in the same way.
And the thing about angular momentum, is it actually creates a torque.
So if you spin it this way,
and you use your hand to curl in the direction of the spin,
the way your thumb is pointing
it creates a torque.
Now...
When you hold it up like this,
obviously there's gonna be a torque.
From the gravity of this thing pulling down, so there's a torque, it wants to spin this way.
BUT
if we spin this thing nice and good,
Now, the torque of the whole thing is this way.
So, instead of the net torque going down,
The net torque is this way!
So it's not trying to go down anymore, a little bit because of friction,
but for the most part, this thing wants to go this way.
So, this thing doesn't actually get any lighter, if I'm holding it like the string, if it's help up like this by itself
or this it's the same way, it's not like it gets any lighter.
And also, if you're wondering why, when you spin it and it's being held up that it wants to turn one way
or the other if it was spinning in the opposite direction.
It is basically because it's creating a torque, another torque.
Because with angular momentum being this way, just the way the math works out
it's gonna create a torque this way.
It's not intuitive at all, it doesn't really make sense.
But if you do the math, that's how it turns out.
Physics, hey, right?
So, there is a reason behind it, just know that.
So you can see, if I spin it this way pushing down like that.
It's gonna want to spin (counter) clockwise from my perspective.
And if I spin it the opposite way,
It should wanna go clockwise.
Yep, alright. So you can see, depending on which way you spin it,
it's gonna create a torque in the other direction.
And spin one way or the other, so pretty cool.
And another cool thing you can do, is just spin it, use it as a top.
It's not exactly balanced but, it works enough.
So that is basically the whole trick. There's not much to it
once you know how it works.
But it is very impressive, and I think your friends are gonna not expect it at all.
'Cause, like I said, who would expect that, I was pretty shocked when I first learned about it.
With a bicycle wheel hanging on a string.
So that's where I got the idea.
If you guys liked this video, let me know what you think down in the comments section
I'd really appreciate it, you can share this video with anyone you want.
And if you want me to make more of these fidget spinner videos,
if I can come up with any cool stuff, having to do with physics, maybe I'll make more.
Obviously this is a tech channel so I'm not gonna turn this into all fidget spinner videos.
But, I thought this was a cool science detour that we could talk about.
Relevant enough and very cool.
If you wanna keep watching, I'll put some other videos right here.
You can just click on those.
And if you wanna subscribe, I make new videos every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.
So it should be worth it.
Maybe enable those notifications as well.
So again, thank you guys so much for watching, I might make more videos about this if I can come up with anything good.
So let me know what you think down in the comments section.
And as usual, thanks so much for watching.
I'll see you next time, have a good one.