Water spirals: a cool video


Today we're going to go back to the function of this column as it was for a while in 2012: to show something cool from the realm of science.
Now what they're saying is that, were you present, the phenomenon wouldn't be apparent...only when you play it back. It's compared to watching wheels seem to spin backwards as you watch them rotate forward. That's because your eyes process information at about 30 frames per second, and you're watching something faster. The shadows I'm seeing suggest you'd detect it, yet the effect seems to require a camera filming at 24 frames per second, slower than the eyes process sight. If it's just a physical oscillation, a mechanical motion causing the effect, we agreed here at Integr8d Soul that it's so uniform that, from our experience, that just doesn't happen. But then, sound is a mechanical effect. We're seeing a change of amplitude rather than frequency. The debate about whether electromagneticism is responsible for the oscillation is beyond my training. Any thoughts? One commenter laughs because sound is about pressure changes...purely mechanical, and nothing to do with electomagneticism. Meanwhile, it's simple and beautiful, and it gets you to think about principles of sound, fluids, optical illusions...the kinds of simple experiments that remind you science, and home experiments, are just plain cool.

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