"Slow Mo Guys" = Great Teaching Tool

"Sir, you're going too fast!" - it is a complaint I hear in my physics classes every so often.  Whether it is the case or not, it is true that there is an ideal speed for progressing through science content in a classroom setting.

Similarly, there is an ideal speed for the viewing of the countless science phenomena that occur in nature.  Often times, events like chemical reactions or travelling waves elapse over too short a time interval to be properly grasped.  This is actually the reason why many scientific phenomena that are now well understood went misunderstood for so long (and why others still go misunderstood).

Take something simple, like an apple falling from a tree.  Five centuries ago, people believed that the fall was at a constant speed, which was governed by the apple's mass (heavy apples would fall faster than light ones).  Of course, this assessment is wrong on many levels, but one can easily appreciate why such a faulty conclusion could be arrived at.  The entire fall of an apple might take one second, which is an insufficient amount of time for a person to gauge an event.

Had mankind invented the video camera a few centuries earlier than it did, enabling it to see the world in slow motion, early science would have evolved more rapidly than it did.  The apple could then be seen to displace more and more with each passing frame, invalidating the constant speed theory.

Some people today may not see how valuable adjusting the frame rate of an event is outside sports and action movies.  Fortunately, a few young people certainly do, and they are responsible for my current favourite YouTube channel: "Slow Mo Guys".