Derek Muller's Reddit account: bow ties and Coriolis

A redditor wrote in r/IAmA

On “IamA guy who makes science videos on YouTube (Destin from Smarter Every Day). Derek from Veritasium and I performed an experiment in both the North and South hemispheres to finally determine the Truth about Toilet Swirl. It's awesome and we're excited about it. AMA!”

A simple scale analysis of the Rossby Number for such an experiment indicates that this is not possible. Rossby Number is Ro = U/(L*f), U is horizontal velocity, L is scale length, f is coriolis parameter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossby_number Low Rossby Numbers (<1) mean…

u/veritasium replied

He notes that the 6 foot pool he used provided a 30,000 amplification of the rotation of the Earth at Boston. This is through conservation of angular momentum as the water drains from the outside towards the middle. As the…

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He notes that the 6 foot pool he used provided a 30,000 amplification of the rotation of the Earth at Boston. This is through conservation of angular momentum as the water drains from the outside towards the middle. As the radius gets smaller the velocity must increase to keep angular momentum constant.

Excerpt

A redditor wrote in r/IAmA

On “IamA guy who makes science videos on YouTube (Destin from Smarter Every Day). Derek from Veritasium and I performed an experiment in both the North and South hemispheres to finally determine the Truth about Toilet Swirl. It's awesome and we're excited about it. AMA!”

Thanks for doing this AMA guys. Derek, how often do people really get the questions on your videos wrong? Do you have to hunt for footage of wrong answers, or is the sample you show in your videos similar to the real distribution?

u/veritasium replied

This is a very important question. For most questions the vast majority of people get it wrong, I'm talking 90-95%, sometimes all of them. My goal when I edit the videos is to show people's perceptions as they are, not…

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This is a very important question. For most questions the vast majority of people get it wrong, I'm talking 90-95%, sometimes all of them. My goal when I edit the videos is to show people's perceptions as they are, not to embellish them, but to accurately represent what people think. Yes I generally don't show the one or two right answers I may come across because they don't fit with the flow of the video.

So it is a little troubling how little most people know about science, and that's one of the major things that motivates me to keep making videos. It should also encourage you to talk to everyone you meet about science!

A redditor wrote in r/askscience

On “Discussion: Veritasium's newest YouTube video on simulating quantum mechanics with oil droplets!”

Could someone explain what is meant by "local?" And I assume by "realism" you mean that there are particles not just wave functions.

u/veritasium replied

Local means no interactions faster than the speed of light. And realism means if when you look at it you find a particle, then it's a particle when you're not looking at it too.

Derek Muller

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