Yesterday I heard a terrific interview with Roger Penrose on Eric Weinstein’s podcast:
The podcast episode is here:
‘Today the boys and I talked through three fun to see, but maybe tricky to understand, ways that something need to rotate 720 degrees to get back to where it started.
We started by looking at a circle rotating around a second circle of the same size:
Next we looked at the famous “wine glass” problem. I originally wanted to color the water in the glass with food coloring, but chickened out!
Before going on to the Dirac Belt Trick, I showed the boys this really nice video showing the trick in a pretty unusual – and super fun – way:
After the video demonstration, I had the boys try the trick with a belt. At the end my old son made a connection between the belt trick and the complex numbers which was a nice and totally out of the blue surprise to me:
Anyone interested in physics should listen to Weinstein’s interview of Penrose – it is amazing. I was really happy to be able to pull out a few ideas from the interview to share with the kids today!
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