NASA’s Space Power Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, is the biggest vacuum chamber in the world, measuring 30.5 meters by 37.2 meters, and has a volume of 22,653 cubic meters. If you watched Commander David Scott drop a hammer and a feather on the televised Apollo 15 mission, then you probably already know how this one ends, but that doesn’t make watching it play out any less spectacular.
It was Galileo who first discovered that in a vacuum, if you were to drop two objects from the same height, they’d hit the ground at exactly the same time, regardless of their respective mass. In the atmosphere of Earth, we rarely – if ever – get to see this phenomenon. That’s where this big vacuum chamber comes in
British physicist Brian Cox wanted to see this phenomenon play out in a vacuum, where there is zero air resistance to affect the acceleration of Earth’s gravity. This was filming done for the BBC 2 show, Human Universe,
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I don’t like this, I wanted to see it at full speed at least once. Because of the 1/6th gravity The David Scott moon experiment looks in slow motion. I want to see full speed so it looks like I expect things to look wehn they fall.
remarkable you can evacuate 800,000 lbs of air and have only a few grams left.
If those grams were just CO2, the whole chamber could have exploded.
The early scientists were satarised for trying to weigh the air.
That was fun.
I’ve always enjoyed watching him talk about things like the sun expanding to engulf the earth – he’s always so happy about the destruction. Seems to be a thing with the TV physisisisists (as my mother in law calls them).
Would have been really cool to see the whole drop at actual speed though.
After what happened a Mann’s place of employment, this town in Ohio should consider changing its name.
I have to say that the whole concept is so counter-intuitive that it is positively miraculous that Galileo was willing to consider this as a possibility and undertake experiments to disprove his theory. Me, I would have just used a model and not bothered to do the empirical stuff after all models are always right and nigh-on impossible to disprove.
Anyone know the evacuated volume, or evacuated diameter, of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)?
I read that the circumference of the circle is 27 kilometers.
How big is the vacuum chamber at the Pickering Nuclear Power Station? It looks bigger than the NASA one.
FYI
Just last week I ran my own experiment. I put an alarmist and skeptic in a vacuum chamber to see if they would react differently.
The skeptic’s head exploded and it was quite messy. Grey matter all over the place.
The alarmist’s head merely expanded like an inflating balloon. For the sake of equality, and my research, I punctured the alarmists head. It did in fact pop like a balloon.
Conclusion:
Never put live human research subjects into a vacuum.
Alarmists are air heads.
I was going to ask if someone would peer review my research but was afraid I’d get snipped if I went [too] far.
Fun video. It reminded me of a favorite riddle of mine when I was a kid.
Which weighs more; a ton of lead or a ton of marshmallows?
Well, you’d certainly weight a ton after eating all those marshmallows.
FYI. Marshmallows in a vacuum chamber are a blast!
@ur momisugly Steve R –
They’re more of a poof than a blast.
Sorry.
What if they filled the chamber with CO2 instead?
Oh, right, they can’t. The universe would spontaneously combust.
After seeing a few posts on this website bemoaning the lack of efforts to reproduce scientific claims, it’s good to see that experiment from 400 years back confirmed. My confidence in Galileo’s work has been boosted incrementally.
The more relevant point would be if the objects didn’t fall at the same rate. If the theory made a prediction that didn’t match reality.
That would be like the pause – proof that the theory was wrong.
Yes, falling at different rates–that would be a real theory-popper, wouldn’t it?
There must be a cartoon somewhere of Galileo at the Leaning Tower of Pisa saying to someone “Of course the feather and the cannonball will land at exactly the same time, it’s basic physics”.
It is alarming to see all deniers so impressed with this voodoo-science. Only a computer model can tell us what would happen in the experiment. My simulation shows that after 7 hours of free fall, a black hole opens up and swallows the ball and feather. This explains the bursts of gamma radiation that satellites frequently detect. I wil have the simulation peer reviewed and published in nature and it will magically become truth.
Cox is a puerile pillock paid by the bbc warmistas.
In an article in the Guardian on 3 September 2014, Professor Cox states:
‘ … But what you’re not allowed to do is to claim there’s a better estimate of the way that the climate will change, other than the one that comes out of the computer models’
Is it any wonder, therefore, that we find him in the third episode of BBC2’s ‘The Human Universe’ giving uncritical airtime to the (in)famous Drake equation, aptly characterised by Michael Crichton as ‘… literally meaningless’?
Very poor production quality. Disappointing.
I was quite disappointed that they never showed the full drop at normal speed. It would take, what, 1-2 seconds? That’s way more impressive than slo-mo.
Here’s the feather/hammer video from the moon.
Woops. Someone beat me to it. Sorry.
Hey, I played your version just to see if it was the same. I think it’s OK to post this twice on this thread (worthwhile).
Great video and a great example of the physics involved for the lay audience, as well, I might add, of the tremendous impact of air resistance on objects generally.
So: they pump out all but 2g of the air. What happens to that remaining 2g? Is it evenly distributed throughout the chamber? It’s still millions if not billions of molecules, I suppose. I had this crazy notion that maybe they would fall like the ball and feathers (but during the evacuation period). Then I thought they’d still possess momentum and might be going in all directions.
Anyone care to enlighten me? I’m no physicist, unfortunately.
No, a few more than a billion actually.
You probably don’t want all of the molecular chemistry and standard gas law equations of analytical chemistry, but essentially, all gasses expand to fit into the space available. As they expand, their molecules move further and further apart, but the density remains “even” under normal circumstances near the earth’s surface. So, in this large room, the density of the 2 grams of air will be essentially uniform.
There are 2 grams in one “mol” of hydrogen H2. A weight of 1 in each hydrogen, times 2 hydrogens, ok?
There are 32 grams in one “mol” of oxygen O2. A weight of 16 in each oxygen 16 times 2 oxygens.
There are 28 grams in one “mol” of nitrogen N2. A weight of 14 in nitrogen times 2 nitrogens. See the pattern?
OK, well dried air is a mix of O2 and N2, with a molecular weight of 28.97.
Every gas “mol” has 6.022 x 1023 molecules in it. Look up Avogadro Law for the details.
So, 2 grams of hydrogen has 6.022 x 10^23 molecules in it, all zooming around the room at a near-perfect vacuum.
Air weighs more than hydrogen, so there are .415 x 10^23 “air molecules” in the chamber, all zooming around as pairs of nitrogen atoms and oxygen atoms.
That’s right. Dalton’s Law of Partial Pressure explains it.
http://www.blizzue.com/index.php/dalton-s-law-of-partial
Believe that Buzz Aldrin demonstrated this Galilean effect on his Apollo mission, dropping a golf ball and a feather simultaneously to the high-vacuum surface of the moon. His comment “This had better work” is an unsung Aristotelian classic… as a high-tech astro/engineer, just what in fact did he expect?
Does anyone know if bacteria could survive in such a vacuum chamber?
Positive about bacteria in general. They convert themselves to spores; in this form, their survival depends more on the presence of things that “go through” vacuum — photons and other particles that can damage them (although the idea of particles in vacuum seems a bit oxymoronic). Let’s say, most bacteria will survive “quiet” vacuum — without UV or “cosmic rays”.
Yeast can survive as-is (not to mention they ordinarily form spores as well). I have seen Aspergillus regrow from an electron microscopy sample, after having been frozen, metallized, and bombarded by electrons in vacuum.
Then there are Tardigrades, whose ability to survive both vacuum and exposure to solar radiation makes the successes of bacteria seem trivial.
A note to those folks who dig the coolness of this demo: there is one other effect that you can only see in vacuum, and it is just as spectacular, if not more; unlike balls and feathers, it is not part of our cultural background so it is truly surprising to see: in vacuum, liquids don’t splash.
Splashing is an atmospheric phenomenon; it weakens and even disappears in rarefied air, at about 1/3rd of atmospheric pressure. So I think it was a huge waste of vacuum (if I can say so) not to have dropped a gallon of water during the same event.
Tens of thousands of dollars spent to pump down and operate the largest vacuum chamber in the world to demonstrate a basic premise of physics known for hundreds of years. And to wreck a perfectly good bowling ball by drilling ANOTHER hole in it…
Your tax dollars at work.
Its called education and will no doubt be played at science classes. Worthwhile. You cannot help but be amazed and delighted by it.