I just watched this today - I've studied physics at Uni - I've done many experiments and known this result for a long-long time. However, this was actually the first time I've seen it myself.
It is awesome to see something so un-intuitive but so well known actually occurring - like if you could actually see quantum tunnelling happening. If you don't find the world awesome then doing physics has got to be a pretty hard slog.
But then I'm over-awed just about every time I use a mobile [aka cell-phone] or computer at the physics and engineering that's happening, the maths being applied, ...
A computing equivalent might be seeing Babbage's Difference Engine[1] or a valve based computer at work for the first time - you know the maths, the algos work, you know the science well enough (certainly in the mechanical computers) but seeing it all chug away and produce the result has a certain enthralling beauty. Maybe it's more like seeing a visual emulator [2] working on assembly code? You know it works, you know why it works (at some level at least) but it's doing it, it's awesome!
That is awesome. I wonder how well that would do for teaching place values to primary school kids - despite having done binary/octal/hexadecimal and other types of number representations with my kids they still struggle to see how decimal uses places and how carrys work.
It is awesome to see something so un-intuitive but so well known actually occurring - like if you could actually see quantum tunnelling happening. If you don't find the world awesome then doing physics has got to be a pretty hard slog.
But then I'm over-awed just about every time I use a mobile [aka cell-phone] or computer at the physics and engineering that's happening, the maths being applied, ...
A computing equivalent might be seeing Babbage's Difference Engine[1] or a valve based computer at work for the first time - you know the maths, the algos work, you know the science well enough (certainly in the mechanical computers) but seeing it all chug away and produce the result has a certain enthralling beauty. Maybe it's more like seeing a visual emulator [2] working on assembly code? You know it works, you know why it works (at some level at least) but it's doing it, it's awesome!
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiRgdaknJCg
[2] http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html