#magnus effect

[nemfrog]

A spinning projectile -a baseball- traces a curved path through air. Frontiers of Physics. 1968.

Internet Archive

[pencilbrony]

Achieve lift

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

Flettner Rotors Spin Anew

In the 1920s, the world saw a new sort of marine propulsion, ships with one or more tall, smokeless cylinders. These Flettner rotors, named for their inventor, would spin in the wind, generating lift to propel the boat, much as a sail would. (Image credit: Getty Images; via PopSci)

[random-fandom-rambler]

“There’s a scientific phenomenon to describe something that happens when an object is in motion. You think you know exactly what path it will take and where it will end up. Then suddenly, for no reason you can see . . . the arc changes. It goes somewhere you would never have expected. It’s called the Magnus effect.”

[materialsscienceandengineering]

A photonic curveball has real-world examples in soccer, baseball

Have you ever been amazed by a curveball goal scored by Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi or Christiano Ronaldo? Then you have—possibly without knowing it—been exposed to the Magnus effect: the fact that spinning objects tend to move along curved paths. In a new publication that appeared in Physical Review Letters this week, Robert Spreeuw shows that the same effect occurs to atoms moving through light—and that this effect has practical consequences.

Even though many people may have never heard the name, the Magnus effect is well known in our daily lives. On YouTube, videos show football playersscoring incredible-looking goalsusing the effect, and there exists a 45-million-view video that shows what happens when youthrow a spinning basketball off a dam. All of these videos show the same basic effect: when a spinning object moves through the air, a pressure difference caused by the spinning causes the path of the object to curve.

Physicist Robert Spreeuw (UvA Institute of Physics) has now shown that the same effect occurs also on a much smaller scale. Replace the football by an atom, or any other microscopic object that has a so-called 'dipole moment', an asymmetry in the way that its electric charge is distributed. Don't let this atom move through the air, like the ball did—air itself consists of atoms, so the moving atom would simply bounce back and forth—but let it move through a beam of laser light instead. The light will exert a pressure on the atom just like the air did on the football, and voilá: the atom experiences a sideways force. This in turn has an effect on the light: just like the stream of air around the football is affected by its spin, the laser beam also measurably bends around the atom.

Read more.

[hoperecruiter]

Magnus flipped the coin over and under his fingers, the circle of metal moving faster and faster. Blue lines of magic seemed to spring from his rings, a tiny storm rising in Magnus’s palm and catching the coin in a net of lightning. Then Magnus threw the coin off the tower, into the night wind. Simon could see the falling coin, still touched with blue fire, going beyond the limits of the Academy grounds. “There’s a scientific phenomenon to describe something that happens when an object is in motion. You think you know exactly what path it will take and where it will end up. Then suddenly, for no reason you can see . . . the arc changes. It goes somewhere you would never have expected.” Magnus snapped his fingers, and the coin zigzagged in the air and returned to them as Simon stared, feeling like he was seeing magic for the first time. He dropped the coin in Simon’s hand and smiled, a blazing rebel’s smile, his eyes as gold as newly discovered treasure. “It’s called the Magnus effect,” he said.

Born to Endless Night

[thehikingastronomer]

Who needs Wingardium LeviOOOsa when you've got physics on your side? Follow me on Instagram to see more like this every single day! https://www.instagram.com/p/BhaCRLuAVi3 Today's #SlowMoScience: levitating a ping-pong ball! All you need for this one is a straw, a ping-pong ball, and a big breath of air. A blow dryer or leaf blower will also work, and can even turn the ball side to side... This is a demonstration of the Coanda Effect, which is similar to, but not quite the same as the Magnus Effect (see my flying cup post). Moving air has a lower density and pressure than still air, and so the air coming out the straw creates a "tunnel" of low pressure. When the ping-pong ball is placed above it, the moving air creates an oscillating region of low pressure area on one side of the ball, and a high pressure area on the opposite side, hence the ping-pong ball's "off-balance" motion. Using a blow dryer, you can rotate the ping-pong ball in mid-air...to a certain extent, before gravity takes over. ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ Follow me for more #science experiments, #slowmotion demos, and new videos where I bring science to the public! Be sure to follow me on Twitter @thescalex, and on YouTube at #ExperienceDalionaScience! New video every Wednesday!

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

Paris 2024: Bouncing and Spinning

Spin, or the lack thereof, plays a major role in many sports -- including tennis, golf, football, baseball, volleyball, and table tennis -- because it affects whether flow stays attached around a ball, as well as how much lift or side force a ball gets. A ball's spin doesn't stay constant, however.  (Image credit: J. Calabrese; research credit: T. Allen et al.) Find all of our Olympics coverage -- past and ongoing -- here and every sports post here. Read the full article