Binder Clip Climber - Numberphile
Featuring Tadashi Tokieda. More Tadashi videos: http://bit.ly/tadashi_vids Numberphile is supported by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI): http://bit.ly/MSRINumberphile We...
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Tadashi: Piece of red string, and, I threaded it through, a binder clip. The binder clip is carrying a passenger underneath. Let's say that this is a top of a mountain, and we are designing a funicular. I want to carry this passenger up to the top of the mountain, summit of the mountain. How can you do this? One solution is to just, uh, widen the string *cracks up* like this, and then make the whole thing go upward. But I don't think the engineers will accept this solution. So, what we do, is to keep those two strings absolutely parallel, no cheating, but then tug on them in alternating fashion. So tug, tug, tug, tug, and look! The clip... starts going up, spontaneously, toward the summit of the mountain. That's strange, right? Because......
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Tadashi: Piece of red string, and, I threaded it through, a binder clip. The binder clip is carrying a passenger underneath. Let's say that this is a top of a mountain, and we are designing a funicular. I want to carry this passenger up to the top of the mountain, summit of the mountain. How can you do this? One solution is to just, uh, widen the string *cracks up* like this, and then make the whole thing go upward. But I don't think the engineers will accept this solution. So, what we do, is to keep those two strings absolutely parallel, no cheating, but then tug on them in alternating fashion. So tug, tug, tug, tug, and look! The clip... starts going up, spontaneously, toward the summit of the mountain. That's strange, right? Because......
