Newton's 3rd Law Reaction Rockets (Part 2))

Hi, I'm Jared. Welcome to Fun Science Demos. Our friends at Educational Innovations put out this really neat science gadget called a reaction rocket. In a previous video, we showed you how this works. Today, we're going to do some other demonstrations based on this reaction rocket. Now, it's a ball attached to a straw with a little plastic rocket, and today we're outside because we want to try and get some really high launches. Each block on our wall is about 20 centimeters, so I don't need the meter stick. So let's see our reaction rocket in action. I'm going to go up 20, 40, 60. Let's try 80 centimeters to drop it. Hold it straight, and our rocket goes up to about here, and I could count and measure that. But what if we didn't use the rocket? What if we use different playground balls to try and get the same reaction to happen? Remember, with our reaction rocket, the energy from the ball is transferred up into the rocket. The rocket doesn't have as much mass as the ball, so that rocket can go high into the sky. What if we use something else? What if we use the basketball and a tennis ball? The tennis ball doesn't have as much mass, so let's try dropping these two and see what happens. This worked exactly like our reaction rocket. The basketball has a lot of energy as it falls, and that energy is transferred into the tennis ball. Let's take a closer look at something. Watch how high this basketball bounces when I drop it all by itself. It comes up to about there. Now watch how high it bounces when I drop it with the tennis ball on top. It only came up to about there. Why? Because all that energy was transferred into the tennis ball to send that tennis ball flying. So what we did now is we went out and got a whole different selection of different playground balls. We have a volleyball, some elastic bouncy balls, basketball, golf ball. We're going to try dropping these and see how high they go. The nice thing about this is this wall extends well up into the sky, so we're going to see what happens when we do a basketball and a golf ball. We're going to try this kickball and this basketball. The hard part is keeping them lined up, because if they're not lined up right, they'll go off on all kinds of weird angles. We can even try stacking three balls on top of each other and see what kind of effects we get. Remember that each block is about 20 centimeters and we can go back on the video and actually count how high each of these balls went. The basketball didn't go very high at all, because that energy was transferred into the kickball. The kickball didn't go that high either, because that energy was transferred into the tennis ball and the tennis ball arced out of the video shot. Now remember the same forces that work with our ball drop are the same forces that work with our reaction rocket. Well what force is that? Well the force of gravity is pulling down this ball, giving this ball all kinds of energy. The force of gravity is at work all around us. It's keeping us on the earth. It's keeping the earth orbiting the sun, and believe it or not, it's keeping the sun orbiting the galaxy. That's a lot of gravity. That's a lot of energy, and without it, well, we wouldn't have the reaction rocket. We've linked to Educational Innovation's website in our video description in case you wanted to buy your own reaction rocket. If you want to learn about forces in motion or just science, check out our channel Fun Science Demos. Science is so cool, especially when you get to launch things into the sky.