After mentioning my memories of my first physics experiment I decided to look for that exercise book. I turned the house upside down a couple of times looking for the battered little grey blotter before my wife remembered a plastic bag of old school books in the roof. I had strong memories of putting the book away in a very safe place so was somewhat sceptical. Of course she was correct and the book was orange.

The write up of “Air is Heavy” makes me happy. A simple experiment that shows something fundamental that has a short write-up, a correct conclusion, and is not marked!

As for my conclusions in the first experiment, “Air Is Every where”, I am not too sure about the my conclusions! There are several more experiments (“Gas Cannon”, “Warm air expands”, “Light”, “Bottle Volcano”) in there, and some terrible and wrong ideas about why a couple of them worked. Maybe we will look at that in a future podcast.

Transcript

This is corrected for grammar and spelling but not physics!

Air Is Everywhere

Air is everywhere. It fills every gap and crack in the world.  There is a layer of air all around the Earth which holds everything down. You can only feel air with the wind or breathing.
We put an upside-down jar in the water and the air started pushing up because it was under water. No water got in to the jar.

Air is Heavy

We hung two balloons up and they balanced each other.

We popped one and the yellow one was pulled up.

This shows that air weighs something.