Some of the best minds on the web these days are ordinary people using their own extraordinary curiosity to take us on little journeys of wonder.
The best of those connect things no one ever thought to combine!
Wonder what you are looking at in that photo above?
Today at Ever Widening Circles (EWC), we point you to three brilliant minds who introduce us to the fascination of oobleck, a remarkable substance that behaves like a liquid sometimes, and a solid under certain other conditions.
Best of all, our first pair of BackYard scientists have some real fun with the subject by using ultra slow motion photography to give us a completely new point of view, leaving us in awe, repeatedly.
The photo above is only a tiny sample of possibility.
Gosh, we can only hope the web moves in a direction that includes more of this! Give TheBackyardScientist a few minutes and see what you think!
Wonderful fun there, huh?
The patterns in these images were stunning!
You’ve got to love people who can make most of us smile with the novel use of common household and backyard items.
I watched all of that with fascination and had to learn more about this substance called Oobleck. It’s quite remarkable. Take a look at an entertaining explanation by an EWC favorite, Hank Green and his YouTube channel called SciShow.
Perfect. Now maybe we can appreciate another non-Newtonian fluid in our life. Did you know that ketchup was one of the most common non-Newtonian fluids?
Curious about that? Think back to the last time you tried to get ketchup out of a full bottle. It behaves like a solid, stubbornly refusing to flow like a liquid until you get the molecules flowing past each other with a number of sharp pounds on the end of the bottle!
Now we emerge from this article a little transformed, by a new view of very ordinary things like water balloons, cornstarch, ketchup, chain saws, and watermelons.
Some would call today’s topic “trivial”, but what if we thought of gaining a completely new perspective, on anything, and then the next time we have the impulse to sum things up, we remembered that things are most often not exactly as they appear?
Cornstarch and water (oobleck) can remind us that this may someday be a little less impulsive world for everyone!
Have a great day.
Remember that few things are ordinary if you find the right point of view!
Stay open, curious and optimistic.
~ Dr. Lynda
Oh, and before you press that button make sure you subscribe below so you never miss your daily dose of optimism!