This Is the Bead-Chain Experiment. It’s About to Melt Your Brain.
Inside this beaker is a 50-meter-long string of 8,000 beads. Watch what happens when you toss one end of the string out of the beaker. Prepare yourself - this is pretty wild.
As you’ve no doubt noticed, the result is a levitating, single-file stream of beads that buckles, loops and coils in a self-propelled bid to escape its container. It’s mesmerizing. In the video, the folks at Earth Unplugged meet up with BBC’s Steve Mould to explore the secret to these self-siphoning beads (aka “Newton’s Beads”), with the help of some super slo-mo footage.
Mould explains at around the 2-minute mark:
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