No matter what you believe, or not, about prayer, Presence, and creation, you’ll be delighted. Take a few minutes to feed the child within watch an episode or two of Demonstrations in Physics. Miller’s physics was a call to prayer, a joyful time to marvel at some small part of creation and to soak up the Goodness flowing through it all. Rumi, the 13 th century mystical poet of Islam wrote: “The beauty and grandeur of God belong to Him the beauty and grandeur of the world of creation are borrowed from Him.”įor me, Dr. Most religious traditions see the Holy One reflected in creation, and creation as a way to encounter that Sacred. Francis and Bonaventure extolling God’s presence in the “book of nature.” For Bonaventure, God is “fountain fullness,” spilling out of and over everything, in all life, outer as well as inner. Miller delight in how things work reminded me of Sts. Like Thornton Wilder said in “Our Town,” saints and poets do, some. Scientists like Montagu and Miller are not the only ones to understand the importance of such presence. In his book, Growing Young, anthropologist Ashley Montagu listed these qualities among others in the childlike nature: “…curiosity, inquisitiveness, thirst for knowledge, the need to learn, imagination, creativity, open-mindedness, experimental-mindedness, spontaneity, enthusiasm…joy…”Īlong life’s path, many of us lose that childlike amazement at the world around us. We can’t see the extraordinary all around us if we aren’t present where we are, looking with open eyes and heart. In addition to adding “enchantment to the soul,” as Miller said, it also opens the soul to receive Grace. Something else came to mind as well: What a gift to retain the wonder and abandon that are natural for children as we become adults. Those memories flooded back as I watched the episode this morning. Julius Sumner Miller: Demonstrations in Physics Dave Meyerhoff 55 videos 15 views Last updated on Demonstrations in Physics was an educational science series produced in Australia. You just learn something you didn’t expect to learn.” If it didn’t go as planned, “Oh well, an experiment never fails. Let’s do it again” (and he and she would). Miller’s frequent expressions: “That’s beautiful. For years, after my daughter disappeared into the basement to build and conduct her own experiments, she would call me down to demonstrate them and echoed two of Dr. Miller loved sharing the wonders of physics in the everyday world from air pressure, to heat conduction, to, one of our favorites, Bernoulli’s principle. We all enjoyed them, but my oldest daughter, now a physicist herself, was the most faithful viewer.ĭr. We didn’t have cable, so my parents taped it for us. Miller’s show aired on PBS and was a staple in our house. I smiled as I watched the lesson on air pressure, a 14-minute delight of knowledge and unabashed enthusiasm. OK, he is really eccentric and, he REALLY got excited in providing demonstrations. His email today included a link to a show he had rediscovered: Professor Julius Sumner Miller’s “Demonstrations in Physics. Dear Julius is a kindly old physics professor who is just a little eccentric. So was wonder.Ī longtime friend who attended school with my daughters and was a frequent visitor to our house, still keeps in touch though he lives most of the time in Southeast Asia. If the spinning body is regarded as an inefficient air pump, air will build up on the forward-moving side causing higher pressure there than on the opposite side.“My name is Julius Sumner Miller, and physics is my business.” That’s how he opened every show. Professor Millers infectious enthusiasm for physics delighted, educated and entertained generations of Australians. This is because the induced velocity due to the boundary layer surrounding the spinning body is subtracted from V on the forward-moving side, and added to V on the backward-moving side. If the body is moving through the fluid with a velocity V, the velocity of the thin layer of fluid close to the body is a little less than V on the forward-moving side and a little greater than V on the backward-moving side. When a body (such as a sphere or circular cylinder) is spinning in a viscous fluid, it creates a boundary layer around itself, and the boundary layer induces a more widespread circular motion of the fluid. It is not the velocity of the air, bit its viscosity - assumed to be negligible in Bernoulli's principle - that is central to understanding the magnitude of the force. At 9:27 in the video he is demonstrating the Magnus Effect. The good Professor says he is demonstrating of Bernoulli's principle, but this is incorrect.
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