Carnival Science
Come one, come all! This weekend, the Maryland Science Center will be hosting its annual Carnival Science Days. Everyone loves going to a carnival, and watching the acrobats and performers as they thrill us with death-defying feats. But we always seem to wonder… how exactly can they do all those amazing tricks?
It’s Science!
Ever wondered how a juggler can keep so many things up in the air? Jugglers have to understand gravity, physics, motion and velocity in order to have enough time to deal with all the other things in their hands. One guy set a world record by juggling 12 beanbags at once! Here’s a great article on the science and mathematics behind juggling.
Watching fire breathers at the carnival always makes me cringe. Who decided that eating fire was a good idea, anyway? Fire breathers fill their mouths with fuel, and then blow the fuel in a fine mist onto a flaming torch, creating a fireball. Performers keep safe from burns by choosing a fuel with a high flash point. That is the temperature at which a substance can ignite, so a fuel with a higher flash point won’t ignite at cooler temperatures, like near the fire breather’s mouth. Read this How Stuff Works article for more on this awesome trick.
One of the main attractions at any carnival is the acrobatics. There’s something mesmerizing about watching people fly through the air. Being an acrobat means being a master of one’s center of gravity. Acrobats understand the concept of mechanical equilibrium, meaning that the sum of all forces on an object is zero. In other words, the acrobat must be able to exert the exact amount of force as their weight on whatever they are balancing on, and they have to learn how to do this while upside-down and flying through the air. Wow. Learn more about the science here.
