The Spangler Effect - Science Magic Season 01 Episodes 29 - 30

STEVE SPANGLER: Well you've asked for magic and today
you're going to get it because we're looking at the things
that float.
You know magicians can take ordinary objects like this
completely ordinary piece of rope and cause it to float in
the air because of their magic.
Watch.
I'm going cause it to float in the air, watch.
I'll put a spell it, float.
[SINGING]
do, do, do, do.
Isn't that amazing?
And then they can break the spell.
Break the spell.
And then in ancient Hindu Faquirs would be in the
streets of India and they can cause it float in the air like
this, float.
[SINGING]
do, do, do, do.
And they would climb to the top of it.
[SINGING]
do, do, do, do, do.
Today, the science of things of-- hey.
Higgensworth, why didn't you tell him to--
fired.
The things that float.
I'm Steve Spangler and I'm all about making science fun.
For the last 20 years, I've been teaching ways to turn
ordinary science experiments into unforgettable learning
experiences.
I have an amazing team who will do whatever it takes to
affect the way people think about science.
And to do that I only have one motto.
Make it big, do it right, give it class.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey Higgens, I'll show you a trick.
Here, watch this.
Pick a card, pick a card, pick a card.
Perfect.
Look at it?
Got it?
Now, I want you to put it back in the deck wherever you want,
that's perfect.
All right, so it's lost in the deck, ready?
A lot of mixing around, OK, I mixed it around.
OK, now I'm going to find your card and I'm going to cause it
to come right out of the deck, it's going to
float out of the deck.
Watch this, magic hand.
[SINGING]
do, do, do, do.
Whoop.
Got it, that is your card?
BRYAN HIGGENS: No.
STEVE SPANGLER: I know it is, it's for sure.
BRYAN HIGGENS: Not at all.
Weren't You raised by magicians?
STEVE SPANGLER: Shut up, I don't have my
magic wand with me.
God, I knew I got it.
I'm going to give a little cut like this, [WHISTLE].
Bam, and is this your card, the eight of hearts?
BRYAN HIGGENS: No.
And I didn't sign it and it says Deb.
STEVE SPANGLER: It's from another show I did.
Any of these three cards yours?
BRYAN HIGGENS: No, no they aren't.
STEVE SPANGLER: Look at these cards and tell me
if you yours anywhere.
You see them?
BRYAN HIGGENS: Yes.
STEVE SPANGLER: You seem them?
BRYAN HIGGENS: Yep.
STEVE SPANGLER: Are we good?
BRYAN HIGGENS: Yes.
STEVE SPANGLER: Now I'm going to it a little shuffle.
You see them at all?
BRYAN HIGGENS: Yep.
STEVE SPANGLER: You see it in there?
BRYAN HIGGENS: Um, hmm.
STEVE SPANGLER: OK, good.
Do you see your card right here?
BRYAN HIGGENS: Yes.
STEVE SPANGLER: Ah, perfect.
Do you see it in here?
BRYAN HIGGENS: Yes I do.
STEVE SPANGLER: Yes.
Do you see it in here?
BRYAN HIGGENS: No.
STEVE SPANGLER: [BEEP]
[BEEP], [BEEP].
OK, is this your card right here, this queen?
BRYAN HIGGENS: No.

STEVE SPANGLER: Three and [INAUDIBLE].
BRYAN HIGGENS: That's it.
STEVE SPANGLER: See.
Can you cut that?
[BEEP]
STEVE SPANGLER: Stand by in three, two.
And out of all the cards that you picked and I shuffled them
and threw them all on the floor, I'll pick up one card.
Is this your card?
BRYAN HIGGENS: That's it.
STEVE SPANGLER: Thank you very much.
BRYAN HIGGENS: Impressive.
STEVE SPANGLER: Thanks.
You ever see Criss Angel in Las Vegas like
float up in the air?
Easy.
But another object like a Styrofoam cup, very tough.
Ready, watch this.
Do, ah.
And you'll see that it's defying gravity.
I got my finger in the the back of the cup.
That's awesome.
Don't tell you Higgensworth.
Higgensworth, I'm going to do a cup trick.
Well here, every man has one of these.
All right, so you take a regular handkerchief like this
and you take your hair out, [WHOOSH]
and you tie it onto this thing here.
And then you tie it here like this, and then you pull it
down, and it floats.
And then you take your scissors and you cut it.
Magic.
This will keep Higgensworth busy for hours.
Higgensworth, get your scissors, come over here.
[DOOR SHUTTING]
For this you're going to need some uncooked rice and some
recycled plastic water bottles.
All right, so the rice goes down inside like this.
You simply fill the container up like this.
And you're going to do two of them so you want them to be
exactly the same.
And so you can see they'll the same, I filled that one
previously.
[HAND CLAP]
So now we're ready to go.
And you're going to need two chop sticks.
All right, so here's what you do.
You take your hand and you plunge it in like this.
And now, only using your fingertips you pick this up
like this and you realize it comes out.
But this one here, watch.
Ah, like magic, it floats.
Now I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking maybe it's the chopsticks and there's a
secret with that.
I switched chopsticks.
I'm going to do the same thing again, watch this.
It goes in there like this and it goes in here like and now
you pick it up.
Watch.
The secret is look.
This is light rice, gravity defying rice and
this is heavy rice.
I know what you're thinking, there's something
wrong with the rice.
There's not, watch this.
We dump them out like this and the rice flows out like this.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
If you look, there's nothing hiding in the bottles.
Two empty bottles, the same amount of rice.

Well of course it's not magic, it's science.
And it actually is about the science of friction.
And the guy who discovered friction, right here.
Leonardo DiCaprio.
BRYAN HIGGENS: Wait, wait, wait.
STEVE SPANGLER: I actually got to meet him.
He signed this to me back-- what?
BRYAN HIGGENS: I said, see here, it was Leonardo da Vinci
in the 16th century.
STEVE SPANGLER: Di--
BRYAN HIGGENS: Not DiCaprio, da Vinci.
STEVE SPANGLER: Could you hang that back up on my wall?
BRYAN HIGGENS: Yep.
STEVE SPANGLER: Could you maybe work on
your script as well?
da Vinci.

What you see is what you get.
You're going to need the materials that
I showed you before.
Two empty water bottles, some rice, some chopsticks.
That's it.
It's how the rice goes into the bottle that's the secret.
Let's do the light rice first.
This is the gimmick-ed bottle so to speak.
So we're going to fill it up with rice.
Keep on putting rice in here until it's full.
Have you ever seen that old puzzle where they fill a
bottle with something, like pebbles and they say, is the
bottle full?
It's filled to the top with pebbles and somebody says yes.
And you go no, no, no.
And then they start pouring in sand and now the sand fills up
the little crevices.
And they say is it full?
And everybody says yes.
And you go no.
And finally they fill it with water.
And only at that point is it full.
Well that's a long way of being able to tell you that
this bottle is not full even though it looks like it's
filled to the top with rice, like this.
All right, see, it's full.
But it's not really full.
Here, watch this.
All you have to do is tap it.
And watch how the rice begins to compact.
Look at how far down it will go.
These plastic water bottles are great.
The original-- this is an old, old magic trick and so the
original one were these kind of fancy glass bottles, but
these work so well.
See how much more rice I can get in.
All right, back to this.
Some more will go in, I'll even push it in with my thumb
a little bit.
A little bit here.
Tap it down.
It'll even take a little bit more.
All right, we don't want to make it look too obvious.
All right, so this here is hard to squeeze, there's a lot
rice that's in here.
This bottle here, we're going to fill up, no tapping at all.
We really want it to be very, very fluffy.

I'm trying not to tap this down at all.
I want this to be nice and fluffy, for there to be a lot
of space in between all those pieces of rice.
All right, I think it's really good at the very end to put it
in there when you're actually doing the trick so it makes it
seem like they're exactly the same.
All right, so here's what's going to happen.
I'll spin these around.
This will be light one of course, and this
is the heavy one.
See, this one already started to go down a little bit, so
you can fill it up.
All right, with the chopstick, this one extremely easy to be
able to push in because that chopstick is going in between
those kernels of rice with no problem at all.
But this one here is pretty amazing because when you push
it down here like this, it's so full but you can actually
hear it, listen.
[RICE CRUNCHING].
Hear it going in?
What's happening are all those pieces of rice are realigning
themselves this way.
They are actually digging into the piece of wood.
So no wonder when you try to pick up this one here, of
course it doesn't work at all.
And this one here, absolutely no problem at all.
It's fun to do with a friend, you're the magician and your
friend can't do it and you can do it.
And the secret of course, is friction
with Leonardo da Vinci.
Now here's the problem.
When you go to pull this one out here, it's a little harder
to pull out.
You will want to put your fingers here and pull a little
bit so it looks natural.
There's more rice in this one than this one.
So when you go to dump it, as you're talking, begin to pour
this one first.
So you can say, all I used was regular rice, watch.
And now it begins to pour because I had that little bit
a head start.
When they flow, they should both kind of fall out, you
hope, as you are shaking them out exactly the same.
Bingo, and you've got it.
Not a bad way to do it.
The other secret, believe it or not is the
shape of the bottle.
You need to have a bottle where the neck
comes up like this.
In doing so when you push this down, it actually allows the
rice to push up against that neck and create the friction
that you need to pick up the bottle.
If you use another container like this, even though there's
a lot of rice packed in there.
No matter what you do, it won't pick up the container.
[DOOR CLOSING]
Well for this trick you're using unpopped popcorn and a
steel ball bearing.
All right, watch this.
The ball bearing goes into the corn and most people don't
realize that corn and the ball bearing have this chemical
reaction here.
Watch this, I'll spin it around, watch.
And you'll see that magically, it turns
into a ping pong ball.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out.
Look at the secret, it's there.
Here's the ball bearing.
This is a density demonstration.
So watch, the little ball hides under the
surface, like this.
Now nobody knows that it's there, it's perfect.
So now if you take the ball bearing, and you drop the ball
bearing in, this eventually, as you start moving it around
will sink down.
And believe it or not, the corn will help push the ping
pong ball up so as you are holding it here like this,
here watch.
Ta da.
So if you're teaching science, what does this teach?
Basically nothing.
I don't know, you can tie it into density if you wanted to.
I think it's a cool trick.
Ah.
Well for this little gem you are going to need to have some
table salt.
And where to you get the table salt?
From your friend's mom's house.
While you are there, get yourself her credit card
because you're going to need to also
get a baby soda bottle.
Where do you baby soda bottle?
A website called
stevespanglerscience.com [BEEP]
I've been asked to remove that one offensive part.
Forget the friends get the salt from your own house.

So this is more of a puzzle than a magic trick
but it is very cool.
So you fill this little test tube.
You can use anything that's like this, but this test tube
works really, really well.
You fill it up with salt, like this.
Then you take an ordinary marble and drop it in.
And now you put the cap on top like this.
That's why we like to use these
little baby soda bottles.
And now the object is this, is to ask a friend, again a
puzzle, to move that little marble from one end to the
other end as fast as they can.
And they're going to try to shake it like this.
And they are going to try to move it down here like this.
It really is tough to move it down, especially if there's
some time involved with it.
It'll take them forever.
If you're a baby sitter, this is perfect.
It'll keep the kid busy for hours.
And if you're ever babysitting for Higgensworth,
it'll take him days.
Ta da.
That only took me about 10 minutes.
There's an easier way to move that little marble from one
end to the other.
And the secret is this.
If you turn the whole thing upside down, so see it's at
the bottom.
If you want to move into the top, here's
what you have to do.
You have to send everything up into the air and when you do
that, the salt will work its way underneath the marble and
literally begin to push the marble to the very top.
So you have this motion of up and down and let it fall down.
And there it is.
So in a matter of seconds, it's at the top.
This is a perfect technique for getting the toy surprise
out of your cereal.
You know how they put the toy surprise in there?
It's never at the top where you want it.
And you have to get your hand in here and
you have to dig around.
And you've got dirty hands, [SNOT BLOW], then all of a
sudden nobody wants your cereal.
So here's how you get the toy surprise to the top.
You go like this, and you shake it up like this.
So if you give it a shake, now that toy surprise will slowly
work its way to the top.
Ta da.
It's at the top.
Who put this in here?
That's not funny.
[DOOR CLOSING]
All right, now let's do a real magic trick.
This is very, very cool.
It uses two glass bottles.
These were, I don't know, water bottles or something.
And two pieces of rope.
So examine them, make sure they're OK.
They should be absolutely the same.
OK?
So here's what we're going to do.
I want you to pick one of the bottles, left or right?
Bingo.
Pick one of the pieces of rope, it doesn't matter.
Got it, all right.
This is called do as I do.
So what you're going to do is you're going to ask him to put
the rope inside the bottle.
Higgins, put the rope inside the bottle.
Do as I do, like this.
BRYAN HIGGENS: OK.
STEVE SPANGLER: OK, put it in.
Hold it in your hand like this.
And now turn it upside-- hold it like this-- turn it upside
down and cause the rope to float in the bottle.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
No it's because I have a magic spell on mine, so watch.
You take the rope like this.
BRYAN HIGGENS: OK.
STEVE SPANGLER: And put it in here like this, got it?
Good and now turn it upside down.
And it floats.
And then you take it like this and the
bottle floats like this.
So when you put yours inside like this,
it'll float like that.
And when you want to release the spell, then it's gone.
See how that works?
So I could put this in here like this, you
turn it upside down.
You go wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.
There's actually a genie inside the bottle and then the
genie holds onto the rope.
It hangs onto it like this.
And you can release the little genie down inside by pushing
the rope down in here and wiggling.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.
And the genie comes out.
See how it works?
You probably think it's--
BRYAN HIGGENS: There's no genie in mine.
STEVE SPANGLER: See, maybe you need a different bottle.
So here, take my bottle.
Take my rope.
I'll take your robe.
I'll take your bottle.
Watch this.
Take the piece of rope, put it down inside, turn the whole
thing upside down.
Let go, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.
See it stays here like this.
Turn it upside down.
And it floats like magic.
And that's how you do a special little trick called
the prayer vase.
Did you get it Higgens?
BRYAN HIGGENS: No, not yet.
STEVE SPANGLER: OK, go and let it go, it'll be perfect.
This is actually an IQ test so if you can do it on the first
try, you're pretty smart.
And if you do this, really smart.
So here's, believe it or not the secret.
A little bit of aluminum foil.
All right, you're not going to need much, you are going to
tear off a little square of aluminum foil like this.
And what we need is we need something that will hook onto
the rope inside.
So what I want you to do is fold it up like
this and make a ball.
So you're going to want to squeeze this down so that it
very easily falls right into the bottle.
The original ones from the magic shop would use a little
piece of cork that somebody had worked on.
I think the aluminum foil works perfectly.
And you can keep on working it and it will fall into the
bottle with no problem at all.
Here's what's great about this bottle.
I happened to find it.
It's this blue which I thought was cool.
I took some black spray paint and actually shot it inside
the bottle here so that you can't see
through the neck here.
You can see a little bit through here which is great,
but you can't see through the neck.
So when you drop this down inside you can't-- nobody
really sees, it's on the bottom and when it's trapped
there in the little neck, nobody can see it at all.
But so you can see what's going on, let's trade out for
a clear bottle.
At the very beginning I had the little piece of aluminum
foil in my finger like this.
So it's called a finger palm, or a clip.
So it's being held here in my hand.
And you turn your hand over and it looks fairly natural.
Now if you sit here and you're worried about, then everybody
going to know that it's in your hand.
But you're not.
Here's a piece of rope and here are the bottles.
And pretend like we had these two bottles, that's fine, OK?
But I'm going to show you how it works with it.
So the little ball goes down inside and now
we're ready to go.
I'll show you about how to load it in here in a second,
but I want to show you how it works.
First of all you take the piece of rope and the rope
goes down inside.
When you turn it upside down, look at what happens.
The little ball gets lodged between the rope and the side
of the bottle.
So now we've set up some fraction that's here.
Pull and you can see.
So when you let go nobody can see this because again, that
neck is black.
So you can't see it.
And now when you turn it upside down, the rope hangs
which is beautiful.
Now to release it, all you have to do is put your hand
here like this.
And when you put your hand on it, it the rope down enough to
be able to release the ball.
I can easily release this and I can do
the whole thing again.
And if they ever it to say there's something in the
bottle you simply turn it upside down and draw attention
to something on the bottom.
All that's really doing is loading that ball back into
your fingers like this.
You pull it back out and you hand them the bottle.
You take this bottle here and you say see, mine's the same.
I loaded it back in and now I'm ready to go once again.
It's tricky.
All right, so let's see if my student can do it.
Ready, hold it in your finger like that, you got it?
Turn it upside down, load it in, perfect.
Turn it back over, perfect.
Nobody hears.
Now this goes in here like this, turn it upside down.
Wiggle, there's a little genie inside, do you have it?
Ah.
Bingo.
And now take and swing it.
[SWOOSH]
You, see you are amazing.
All right, so now put it back down again.
Push it down a little bit because that will release it,
so you're going to have to do it here close.
So release it, good job.
Pull it back out again and you've done it.
BRYAN HIGGENS: Awesome.
STEVE SPANGLER: That's awesome.
And now you know the science of things that float.
You did a good job.
Now if you get this and the rope thing in the
handkerchief or--
you could do kid's birthday parties.
You could put it all in a little tub.
BRYAN HIGGENS: That's true.
STEVE SPANGLER: My boys are having a
birthday party next Saturday.
BRYAN HIGGENS: Why didn't I see this coming?
STEVE SPANGLER: And you should put it all there because the
kids would love to see you there.
You could maybe make a little extra money.
Not from me of course, but if you did a good job on mine,
there might be some neighbors that would want you to come.
BRYAN HIGGENS: All right.
STEVE SPANGLER: Maybe some YouTube viewers would like you
to come their house too.
BRYAN HIGGENS: I'll let you know Steve.
STEVE SPANGLER: I think you should do that.
And then you're not going to let me know, I need you there
at the house.
So it's next-- if you take out your phone, all right, write
this date down, OK?
BRYAN HIGGENS: All right.
STEVE SPANGLER: It's next week, it's next Saturday.
If you come a half an hour early, we got to get the
backyard set up so.
So that would be perfect.
Press Save, save.
Good.
So if I were, I'd get practicing.
You are going to do a good job.
My kids are going to love you.
And if they're bad, we're going to shut this circus down
like they were bad at the last magician, but they've learned.
OK?
You'll going to do great.
My kids are going to love you
[MUSIC PLAYING]
STEVE SPANGLER: If I were to ask this what this is, you
would probably say a pitcher full of milk.
But what it really is is evaporated milk.
Let me show you what I mean.
I'll pour the milk into the cone and all it takes for the
milk to evaporate is my magic wand.

[LAUGHTER]
Evaporation is complete.
MALE SPEAKER: For heaven's sake.
How did you do that?
STEVE SPANGLER: Very well.
[LAUGHTER]
MALE SPEAKER: Just like his father is what he is.