Everyday Physics

by

This video clip from WALL-E shows everybody’s favorite trash compactor robot flying through space in an escape capsule and engaging in a fire-extinguisher powered dance with his robot girlfriend. Watch the video and pay attention to the physics of the animation. In terms of Newton’s three laws, the animators got some things right and some

by

Honeybees perform a dance, called the “waggle dance”. Using this dance (combined with olfactory cues) a foraging bee can tell her friends the distance and direction one must travel to find food. Distance and direction, hmm? Bees, like physics students, understand the usefulness of vectors.