Ring and Chain Magic Trick - Science or Magic.

Hey there, welcome to Beals Science. I'm Craig Beals and today we're going to do something called science or magic. This is something I love to do with my students. So I'm a high school science teacher and I like to do some simple magic tricks every once in a while to get their attention, but really to talk about the science behind the magic trick. So here's one that's very simple in the sense you can get it all at the hardware store. So I've got just a pull chain that I've turned into a loop and I've just attached it on itself and then I've got a steel ring. With the science or magic, obviously we're looking at the science, but sometimes science is magical. We show them just how magical science can be. Because now look, it is on the loop. I mean, not just on the loop. Let me get in there. It is on the loop. I've got it! If it isn't magic and it's actually science, well, what's the science? Check this out from a couple different angles and see if you can figure out what the science is behind the magic. Now maybe you noticed that the steel ring was trying to rotate. Look at that. And that causes the chain to flip up and knot itself on the ring. But really, how's it doing this? What's the science? Let me walk you through how to hold this. Now we've got the chain in one hand spread apart by our fingers and then the loop is the important part. Okay, I'm going to hold one finger underneath. Look at it from this way. So then when it falls, it spins. So I like to hold it this way so it's resting on my thumb. Okay, and then when I pull my thumb away it'll fall. You can see when it falls, you pull my thumb away. There you go. Now this is just physics. The first thing we're dealing with is gravity. Gravity is going to pull that ring down and remember the ring is trying to rotate. This is called angular momentum. I read a paper about it and it gets to about 140 degrees and because of the friction, it's causing that energy to go into the chain and Newton's third law says that when we have an action, we have an equal and opposite, it's going to pull that chain up. It's going to split apart because of the frictional force between the steel and it's going to loop itself around and make a knot. So simple physics in our magic. So there we go. We've dissected the chain and the ring magic trick. A little bit of science or magic and I always ask this to my students at the end. Is it science or is it magic? Well obviously it's science but I'm not going to lie to you. It's pretty magical. Hey thanks for watching. If you hit the subscribe button down there, I'll keep on making more and you can learn more because really my whole goal here is just to convince you to keep on learning. Oh what you're all right you're distracting me talking to me about believing.