Congratulations! Your video, I Want To Report This Man For Slinky Abuse!!!!, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 40 Badge!

This is what Slinky hell will be like.

Your video, I Want To Report This Man For Slinky Abuse!!!!, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Isn't like the slinky?

Imagine if you set one slinky off down those stairs, waited 2 seconds and then sent another one off. Same thing but with water, so it's just waves driven from the top of the stairs. The stairs look pretty uniform, so the waves are just travelling at the same speed and happen to line up.

Something that i'd like to do is go to the top of the stairs and oscillate the water myself timed so you could make patterns that moved or "flashed".

Probably cars driving by at the top of the stairway cause "waves" that slinky down the stairs.

Your video, Water Moves Like A Slinky Down Stairs, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

All the research I've ever read/heard from professional sources appears to completely refute what you are suggesting.

Maintaining a decent distance speeds up the average flow of traffic! Being a little further behind doesn't slow anyone down it just makes them further away from each other.

A car doing 30mph 2 feet behind another is going EXACTLY as fast as a car going 30mph 20 feet behind another. Distance between cars doesn't make anyone have to go any slower, simply that they are further away relative to each other.

It also has the benefit of reducing or even preventing the wave phenomenon which SLOWS DOWN the traffic or even stops it dead. (capitals just for emphasis not sarcasm).

The distinction you are suggesting between smooth and fast flowing makes no sense to me. Smooth flowing traffic IS fast flowing traffic. It's the wave effect that slows traffic down not the amount of tarmac taken up.

The physical length of highway a car takes up would only matter if you were trying to park them. I can see why this might seem to matter from the subjective POV of someone stuck in a jam/slow moving traffic. But if everyone maintained distance this situation would be less likely to occur (and reduced in effect when it does).


Smooth traffic is fast traffic. We are not confused. This is based on modern professional studies of traffic dynamics. Having less lanes is know to actually speed up jammed traffic under many circumstances (London M25 springs to mind)


Let me put this another way. Watch that vid again. He isn't going any slower than the flow of traffic he's just further away from the car in front. You can tell this because he's maintaining a steady distance from the car in front. The only people who are being slowed down are the asshats behind him driving bumper to bumper. They experience what seems like a temporary reduction in speed but this is simply an illusion created by giving back the healthy separation between vehicles that should have existed in the 1st place. i.e. they are just "paying back" a few feet of roadspace each, which they took up at a previous point in time. They won't get anywhere any faster or slower as a result & this way it helps to reduce the "slinky effect" which actually does reduce average travel time from point A to B.

There's some confusion in the comments concerning the difference between smooth flowing traffic and fast flowing traffic.

These are not the same things.

Increasing the distance between you and the car in front of you to maintain a consistent speed will help to buffer the slinky effect in traffic.
It will NOT eliminate traffic jams.
You're actually reducing the efficiency of the highway and causing the slow down behind you to increase.

Decide what you mean by 'traffic jam'. Is it stop-and-go traffic or slow speeds? Follow this guy's advice to stop the slinky, with the negative effect of reducing average highway speed behind you. Fill in the gaps if you dread slow highway traffic, with the negative effect of creating more inconsistency in speeds.

Your video, Slow Motion Slinky drops---with the bottom frozen in mid air, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

The implication is that the slinky has the ability to 'know' anything.
I feel it would be much better to say the bottom of the slinky doesn't react until the force acting on it is no longer equal and opposite to the force of gravity instead of personifying the slinky and the forces acting on it in order to make a non-apt analogy. I was always bothered by that kind of over-simplification in science class and often had to correct the teacher when the analogy fell apart.

I like the information explanation: The bottom of the slinky doesn't know its falling until the top bit tells it to

Oh, if someone wants the actual Physic's explanation and not just the Art of the Drop!

http://videosift.com/video/Slinky-Drop-Answer

It's Slinky! It's Slinky! has been added as a related post - related requested by jonny on that post.

Wait, is tha only feature on an otherwise featureless expanse of desert a cat trying to sneak up on us? Well, whatever it is it's super slinky so just ignore it.