69 questions · 35 sources · 0 syntheses
Everyday and Recreational Physics
Physics found in ordinary phenomena, from coffee sloshing to banana peels.
Source-derived questions
Questions extracted from the papers in this topic, excluding the curated questions above.
- According to Matthews, what would you have to change about your table or your toast to beat the odds?
- At what impact energy do full versus empty beer bottles shatter, and why does an empty bottle survive longer?
- Did socks over shoes actually outperform ice cleats in the trial?
- Did washing fully remove bacteria and viruses from contaminated beards?
- How did 1960s Army researchers test whether beards harbour dangerous microbes?
- How did Beseris and colleagues test whether facial hair cushions blows to the jaw?
- How did Haavelmo's 1944 monograph become the methodological foundation for modern econometrics?
- How did Jillian Clarke test the validity of the Five-Second Rule?
- How did Len Fisher model biscuit dunking as a problem in capillary action and porous media?
- How did Murakami's team test the effect of phone distraction on pedestrian flow?
- How did Murphy's Law spread from a press conference remark into common language?
- How did researchers test whether socks worn over shoes prevent slipping on ice?
Show 57 more questions
- How did the Eindhoven team collect millions of pedestrian trajectories to study crowd behavior?
- How did the researchers compare the slipperiness of banana peel against orange and apple peel?
- How did the size of the staring group affect how many passers-by stopped to look up?
- How does Bernoulli's principle explain the low-pressure vortex created by a shower spray?
- How does a mother duck's bow wave generate lift for the ducklings swimming behind her?
- How does lighting condition change the number of exposures needed to avoid a blinking subject?
- How does the Moon's lower gravity change the biomechanics of running enough to make water-running theoretically possible?
- How does the Mori-Tanaka technique combine with a three-phase shear lag model to estimate effective elastic properties of hierarchically reinforced composites?
- How does the friction coefficient of a banana peel compare to wet ice or a waxed floor?
- How large was the object believed to have caused the Tunguska event, and how much energy did it release?
- How long did Thomas Parnell wait before even opening the sealed funnel of pitch?
- How many times a day does a woodpecker strike a tree, and at what deceleration force?
- How quickly did food dropped on contaminated tiles pick up E. coli in her experiment?
- What anatomical features protect a woodpecker's brain from repeated high-speed impacts?
- What balance of forces decides when a dunked biscuit collapses rather than holding together?
- What blink statistics did the researchers use to build their formula?
- What causes a cacio e pepe emulsion to break into a grainy, clumped sauce?
- What compound does a cut onion release that causes eyes to water, and how does it form sulphuric acid in the eye?
- What did the near-total absence of ancient impact craters on Venus reveal about its geological history?
- What did the study 'The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow' actually document?
- What did the study find about the direction hair whorls spiral in the northern versus southern hemisphere?
- What did the synthetic bone experiments show about hairy versus bare samples?
- What differences did Clarke find between men and women in invoking the Five-Second Rule?
- What earlier physicist tried and failed to solve the spaghetti-breaking problem?
- What evolutionary explanation does the beard-as-armor hypothesis suggest for human facial hair?
- What forces of mutual avoidance did the statistical analysis extract from ordinary foot traffic?
- What incident during the 1949 Air Force rocket-sled experiments led to the coining of Murphy's Law?
- What is the Deborah number, and how does it distinguish a liquid from a solid?
- What is the connection between sunlight exposure on skin and vitamin D production?
- What is the popular misconception about hair whorls and the Coriolis force that this study tested?
- What is the theory of hyperbolic conservation laws and shock waves that Lax developed, and where is it used today?
- What longstanding debate in fluid dynamics did this experiment settle?
- What makes Fardin's cat-fluidity paper a genuine application of rheology rather than just a joke?
- What method did David Schmidt use to model and confirm the shower curtain vortex?
- What physical factors does the Ponytail Shape Equation combine to predict the shape of a swaying ponytail?
- What role does starch from pasta-cooking water play in stabilising the cheese-and-water emulsion?
- What rule of thumb did Svenson and Barnes devise for how many photos to take of a group?
- What substance does a banana peel release under pressure that makes it so slippery?
- What threshold temperatures and starch concentrations did the physicists identify for a stable sauce?
- What typically caused the ceramic lavatories in the study to fail?
- Who is the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize?
- Who were the three men credited with the origin of Murphy's Law, and what was each one's role?
- Why are standard crash-test dummies inadequate for simulating a collision between a car and a moose?
- Why can a falling coconut cause a serious head injury given the tree's typical height and fruit weight?
- Why did no one, including the dedicated webcam, ever manage to witness a drop actually falling?
- Why did swimmers move at the same speed in the thickened water as in normal water?
- Why did the researchers rely on modelling rather than an actual experiment on the Moon?
- Why do near-misses in a crowd reflect an orderly process rather than chaos?
- Why does a cat poured into a vase count as exhibiting fluid behavior under this measure?
- Why does a shower curtain billow inward and cling to a bather when hot water runs?
- Why does a single distracted walker degrade traffic flow for everyone nearby, not just themselves?
- Why does dry spaghetti almost always break into more than two pieces?
- Why does each duckling further back in the line expend less effort than the one in front?
- Why does pitch behave like a solid when struck but flow like a liquid over long timescales?
- Why does the entry argue this kind of undignified hazard gets overlooked by safety literature?
- Why had the enzyme behind onion tears gone unnoticed for decades despite the tear-inducing compound being known?
- Why is it physically impossible for a human to run across water on Earth?
Sources
- Multiscale modeling of regularly staggered carbon fibers embedded in nano-reinforced composites
- Death of Peter Lax
- Ig Nobel Prize in Anatomy
- Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Ig Nobel Prize in Engineering
- Ig Nobel Prize in Kinetics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine
- Ig Nobel Prize in Ornithology
- Ig Nobel Prize in Peace
- Ig Nobel Prize in Peace
Show 23 more sources
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology
- Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health
- Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health
- Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health
- Ig Nobel Prize in Safety Engineering
- Magellan spacecraft launched toward Venus
- McCollum identifies vitamin D and its role in preventing rickets
- Nobel Prize in Physics
- Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences
- Tunguska event