Stuff You Should Know - Boomerangs: Magic Sticks of Physics

Episode Date: December 16, 2014

The physics behind returning boomerangs literally may be the most difficult concept to understand in the entire body of science. Join Josh and Chuck as they try their absolute best to describe how boomerangs work - and maybe even pull it off! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

attention bachelor nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all and now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack

and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Noel is with us today. Yes, producing. Yeah, which makes it a super special stuff you should know. A more here stewed stuff you should know. That's right. Although Noel did get a haircut. I know. He looks like a buddy of mine from elementary school. Your elementary school friend had a full beard? No, without you. He took away the beard. It'd be like

any number of my friends from elementary school. Yeah, there was always that one guy, though, that had the early, early facial hair. Oh yeah. My, you know, Jim Issa. Yeah, oh man. Middle Eastern. He sort of had a little mustache in like the seventh grade. I had a friend named Ron in elementary school. Man, he had like a deep voice and like the mustache and everything. It may have been fourth or fifth grade. Now he sells stereos. So obviously we're talking boomerangs, Chuck. That's right. And if you associate boomerangs with Australia, there's actually a pretty good reason for that. It turns out that boomerangs, what you think of a boomerang, which is kind of like a crescent shaped stick that you throw,

and it just comes back to you eventually and you catch it and look at your friends and say, pretty cool, huh? Yeah. Now like, how do you do that? That was, most people think, perfected by aborigines in Australia. That's right. If you want to go back even further, while there's a couple of types of boomerangs, well there's many types of boomerangs, but two main categories is one that returns to you that you play with and the one that you go out and try and kill animals with that does not return to you. I call those the sad boomerangs. Some people call them rabbit sticks. Rabbit? Oh no. I know, isn't that mean? But if you want to learn how to make one yourself, go to Survival Skills, the website. The Hunting Boomerang. It's actually, it's pretty cool. This

guy does, he makes, he shows you step by step how to make a boomerang. Natural skills, I'm sorry. Natural skills. He just goes out in the woods and finds like a kind of roughly boomerang shaped stick and then hues it into like a functioning non-returning boomerang. It's pretty awesome. Well, and that's what people theorize is how the boomerang came about. Back in Tuktuk's day, they would eventually learn to take a club and beat an animal on the head and then maybe one of Tuktuk's friends was smart enough to say, hey, maybe if I throw this at the animal from a distance, I won't scare them away. Or that animal's faster than I can run, but I can throw a stick faster than that animal can run. Let me hit it in the head with the stick. That's right. And so

over time, just like with any early tool evolution, I guess you would find sticks that flew better and further and further. And eventually they sort of took the shape of a boomerang because of its unique flying properties. Yeah, they figured out that like a curved stick, you can aim it more easily and it'll fly longer. So they started selecting for those kind of sticks and then they started making those sticks themselves like somebody from the Natural Skills website would. Yeah, the design of the two different branches made it more stable. Yeah, and we'll get into the mind bending physics behind a boomerang. Boomerangs, frankly, are magic sticks of physics. They are. They're almost impossible to understand them,

like what's going on, but we're going to do our best to explain it. And it's with a non-returning boomerang, it's kind of straightforward. It's the returning boomerang that they say the Aboriginal Australians were the first to invent that is really difficult to grasp the physics behind. Yeah, and the oldest non-returning boomerang they found in Poland from about 20,000 years ago. Yeah, that's surprising to me. And what, that was that far ago? No, it was in Poland. Oh. Because I think of like boomerangs exclusively associated with Oceania. Yeah, not Poland. Yeah, they were found in Native American tribes too and stuff kind of all over the world. So Australian Aborigines use something called a Kiley exclusively for hunting at first.

And they think, and this is I think the neatest thing, because you certainly can't, you know, like find this out factually, but they think that eventually they stumbled upon one that kind of came back and they thought it was fun. So they started throwing returning boomerangs. Yeah, because it's like just to get their kicks. Just for kicks, because returning boomerang you can't use for hunting. Well, no. Because if you throw a returning boomerang and you hit an animal, well, if you hit the animal, it's not going to return back to you. That's not real. That's saying just cartoons, everybody. Yeah. So that's why there's two types. There's ones that you brain an animal with and there's another that you just throw around to impress your friends. That's right.

And apparently though, the Aboriginal Australians figured out how to use returning boomerangs to hunt. They would put some nets up in trees. Oh, yeah. They would throw the boomerang, the returning boomerang and then whoever was best at making like an eagle or hawks call would make that call and it'd scare all the birds because they'd see this thing flying here a hawks call and they'd fly into the nets and the Aborigines would eat them. Not a bad idea. So that's pretty much the history of boomerangs. Yeah. And they, you know, no one owns a patent on the boomerang. There are many kinds of boomerangs that people have patented, of course, but the original boomerang was just, hey, this was something we figured out on our own. It's like DNA. Yeah. Yeah. It belongs to the ages.

Okay. It belongs to the universe. So your returning boomerang is going to be a little lighter, obviously, because you're not trying to kill a rabbit. It's just for showing off. Yeah. And I've even, you know, they have the little nerf versions for kids. I had one of those when I was a kid, the little three pronged boomerang. Yeah. And those are kind of fun. But if you look at videos of the real deal, like large three foot wooden boomerangs, it's pretty impressive to see. Like, you know, it's a tough thing to do. You're not just going out there in your first try and no, to fly back to you. No, there's actually like boomerang teams around the world. Yeah. US boomerang team. Yeah. Unless you're a wonderkin, of course, or a natural. I'm sure that's

on your, on your first time. I'm sure it's happened before. Yeah, maybe. This may be you want to get a boomerang, by the way. Did are you going to? No, no, no, maybe. What I'm hoping is a fan makes handcrafted boomerangs and send us one. Oh, yeah. I hadn't thought about that. I'll bet we have at least one boomerang maker listener. So send us two. Yeah. Nice. Thanks, Chuck. That way we can go out and perform a little two man boomerang. Oh, yeah. Maybe we can like cross them and everything. Sure. That'd be cool. Get our back down. So, um, the, again, the non-returning boomerangs are pretty straightforward. It's the returning boomerangs that are lighter and they're, they're made to be more aerodynamic. And the proper way

to throw a returning boomerang is, um, to hold it at a vertical angle, hold it up and down, right? Which is weird because if you ever see somebody throw a boomerang, when it comes back, it's horizontal. Yeah. It's horizontally oriented. Yeah. Kind of just lands very softly like a helicopter. Right. The thing is, is it goes from upright to horizontal in the midst of this path and it comes back to you. And if you stop and think about it, like that makes zero sense whatsoever. Yeah. A non-returning boomerang certainly doesn't do either of those things. It's just the returning boomerang. And the whole reason behind this is because of the design of the returning boomerang. It's basically a two-pronged propeller that's not attached to anything that

thanks to the force you give it and its rotation and a whole other bunch of stuff that we'll get into, it leans to the clock, it falls to the left, turns clockwise and comes back to you. That's if you're a right-handed thrower. Yes. With a right-handed boomerang. If you're a left-handed person, you have to have a left-handed boomerang and some mirror image of the right-handed boomerang. Yeah. If you try to throw a right-handed boomerang with your left hand, it's not going to work out so well. I bet there's one person out there that's like, oh. I had no idea. So we're going to muster up our courage and get into the physics of the boomerang right after this. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns

with a brand new Tell All podcast. The most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope, but I promise you this. We have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all, and now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody care for me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this, and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris

Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, here we go. Here we go. All right. So I guess the first thing we should talk about is a little bit about just the physical design of the boomerang itself. The wings are slightly tilted. So it creates what's called an airfoil, just like an airplane wing. If you look out your plane window there and you're

sitting on the wing, you're going to notice that the top of it is rounded and the bottom of it is flat. And that is going to give a plane lift and a boomerang lift. Right. The air going over the top of the wing because it's curved in like a teardrop shape, it picks up speed, right? So the air speed is increased, which means the air pressure is also increased. Well, beneath the wing, it's flat. The air is just going through like it's whatever, but the air pressure is higher. So you have lower air pressure at the top, higher pressure at the bottom. That means that you have lift. I believe that is Bernoulli's principle. Is it? I think so. Show off? No, not really. So that's the whole thing behind both airplane wings, like you said,

and boomerang wings. Because again, if you really want to start to understand boomerangs, first of all, do more research than just listening to this podcast. Sure. But secondly, you have to think of the boomerang as basically two airplane wings facing the opposite direction connected together. Okay? That's right. And that forms essentially a propeller. Yeah. And a propeller is, well, it's, it's basically, if you think about a boomerang, it has an axis just like a propeller does, but the axis isn't there. Does that make sense? Yeah. It's invisible. Yes. The propeller is connected to something because it has to lift the helicopter propeller, because that's to lift the helicopter. Right. Or if it's on the

front of a plane, it's going to pull that plane forward and up, which is sort of a key we'll get to in a second. Yeah. But it's the same principle, but a boomerang just has an invisible axis, let's say. Okay. So it does. And it's very important because at that axis, which you can just imagine is in the center of the boomerang where the two wings come together. Yeah. That's the axis of rotation that the boomerang has. It's spin. Yeah. And this article does a good job of pointing out that you would think then if you just turned it completely horizontally like a Frisbee, it would act like a helicopter propeller and just go up. Yeah, straight up. Or if you turned it completely vertically, which is how you're supposed to throw it. It would just go

side to side, but it doesn't do either one of those things. No, and it doesn't. And the reason why is because if you turn on an airplane propeller or a helicopter propeller, a rotor, it starts from a stationary position and just starts spinning. Exactly. The boomerang doesn't start from a stationary position. It starts spinning along that central axis and it's also thrown. Yeah, it's got that forward momentum already. Exactly. So it has now, because you threw this thing, you threw it and it started spinning around its own axis, but you also gave it that forward momentum, which is linear momentum, which means that it's now spinning around two axes. That's right. Okay. Is this gyroscopic procession? We're close. We're almost there.

And we get there because of these two axes. So consider this. So the thing is just spinning around. You just thrown it. It's upright and vertical. It's vertically oriented to the earth. And you throw it. And when you throw it, say it has a spin around that imaginary axis in the middle of the boomerang. Yeah, or at that point. At like 20 kilometers an hour. Yeah. Okay. Because we're in Australia, so we're going to use kilometers. Exactly. Well, plus also I read a Japanese paper on this. That's what they use. And it makes sense. But you threw it that energy, your arm transferred to it when you threw the Frisbee 2, which gave it its linear momentum. Yeah. Say that's making it move through space

at 100 kilometers per hour. Okay. That's right. So as the thing's spinning, whatever blade is at the top of the of the spin is going in the direction that you threw it, right? Yeah. And you threw it at 100 miles an hour. And it's spinning at 20 kilometers an hour. That means that that top blade is spinning at 120 kilometers an hour. Yeah, you said miles, but yeah, we get it. Okay. You're mixing miles with kilometers. I'm like, I'm just barely hanging on here. The bottom one though is going in the opposite direction. So it's actually moving at 20 or 80 kilometers per hour. Yeah. So the top is 120. The bottom one is working in the opposite direction. So it's going 80 kilometers per hour. But these things are attached to the same thing.

Yeah. So this difference actually creates a difference in air pressure to its vertical orientation. That's right. Which creates torque, which tilts it. And now we've entered gyroscopic precession. Yeah. And I think I precession, I think I sort of said it like procession, but it's within E. Yeah. It's like what gives earth seasons. Yeah. That wobble. The spin is another part of a very important part. Because when you throw it, and we'll get into exactly how to throw it here in a bit, but you want to give it a good wrist snap to give it as much spin as possible. Right. And the spin is going to be determined, the basically the rate of spin by a few things, the length of the wings. If they're these huge wings, the spin isn't going to be as

great. The angle that they're joined and the amount of force applied by you, the thrower, and just like a gyroscope, which if we really wanted to torture ourselves, we should do one on gyroscope. Man, that would be melt. My brain would melt. Yeah. I just, my brain didn't process that stuff well. But like a gyroscope, it's going to have more stability the faster it spins. So that's why you want that good wrist snap. Yeah. And the reason why it has more stability is because so that torque, that pressure that that's being created by that difference in air pressure. Yeah. That force is being pushed down is actually stabilized throughout the spin of the boomerang. Right? Yeah. Like if you're going super fast on a bicycle and you take your hands off the handle

bars, you're going to keep going straight. If you're going like super slow, you're going to start wobbling around. Right. Exactly. The thing is, is that pressure, that force of torque is constant. Yeah. So it eventually, because I think precession is, if you're throwing with your right hand, precession always comes on in a counterclockwise motion. Okay. The torque turns, it turns the boomerang to the sides, which is why it eventually comes back around you horizontally. Yeah. That's what lays it down. And it also brings it in an arc that forms a circular path that comes back to you. That's right. It's all gyroscopic precession. And it's because the boomerang, this little simple stick that's basically one crescent shaped piece of wood turns into a gyroscope that it, that

turns on three axes. Yeah. All at once. Yeah. All in one throw. And so it goes from straight, it goes from stationary being straight up and down to spinning and curving around in an arc back to you at a hundred kilometers an hour. Crazy. All because you tossed it correctly. Yeah. And the design, I mean, there are many, many different designs of boomerangs. Like I said, they can have two wings, three, four. You can look like a curl and have blades attached to them because there is something called a battle boomerang. Yeah. Man, that's, that seems dangerous. Yeah. It seems totally dangerous. I'll bet you could find that at like a head shop somewhere next to like a dragon pewter statue or something. They're probably the deal. So you can bind

together for cheaper. Some of them do, some of them have what's called circulators though, which are, can be little bumps and pits on top, which can increase the lift even more. And I read an interview with one boomerang builder and he was like, you can't, you know, I'm sure like Nerf can with their, their, you know, soft ones, but like a true large three foot wooden boomerang. He said, you can't computerize these and build them like they kind of need to be handcrafted and thrown and then tweaked and then thrown. So you get it just right. And I saw one of the US boomerang team guys demonstrating on video and he just put like a rubber band on his to, I guess, adjust it. So that makes sense. Yeah. Cause you know, like, uh, if you're,

if you have a ceiling fan or something like that, you can add weights or something to get to stabilize it, that kind of thing. Yeah. Or when you get a, uh, when you get your tires and start installed on your car, you know, they put those little, those lead weights to, uh, uh, what's it called? Align it. Yeah. To align it. Yeah. They put on that machine and if it's wobbling, they'll add the little weights on the interim. Yeah. I just thought they thought there was a wizard in back. You're always in the waiting room drinking coffee and reading, uh, browsing their computer dragon statues. No, it's kind of cool to actually, uh, I think it's kind of cool. It's really kind of nerdy to watch your tires get aligned. Yeah. They put it on the machine and spin

it. And it's really kind of just like this. And they look at it. And if it's, if it's wobbling at all, they know exactly where to tap on these little weights. Nice. Because yeah, you don't want your tires to be a gyroscope. No, not at all. You don't. That makes for unsafe driving. Uh, so I guess we should, after this message break, teach you how to throw a boomerang. Attention bachelor nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope, but I promise you this. We have a lot to talk about for two decades. Chris Harrison saw it all.

And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody here for me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this. And I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly every day of my life. I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, you've got your boomerang. You're out in the field or on the beach. Beach is going to be tough because wind is one of the forces that are going to act on that boomerang. There are five forces. I'm so nervous. The force of gravity, the force caused by that propeller motion, the force of your throw force caused by uneven speed of the wings and then the wind. And the guy that I watched throw on on YouTube said that he liked to throw on with a slight breeze in his face. And he said that that it depends on the angle at which you're going to release it though, depending on how the wind and there's a lot of trial and error

involved. And it's yeah, apparently you you want wind. I couldn't figure out what the deal is with this, but it somehow helps the boomerang move. But you have what's called an angle of attack. And that's basically how you orient yourself to the wind. The wind's blowing in your face. You should turn and face. You don't want your shoulder now being hit by the wind because that's 90 degrees. He turned a little bit to the right. So probably about like 45 degrees. And that's what you throw to. So it's you're throwing at an angle to the direction the wind is coming at you from. Yeah, but this guy kind of worked it out like he threw the, you know, he kind of measured the wind, you know, to the old finger test. Yeah. And he said, I'm going to angle myself a little bit to

the right. And I'm going to throw it. And he said, and it should land just in front of me. It went behind him. And he was like, well, I was wrong. So I didn't have a good wind measurement. So let me angle a little bit more. And sure enough, the thing came right back to him. Nice. So it all depends on what angle of against the wind that you throw that thing. Like Bob Seeger says, oh man, I can't stand that guy. Really? Bob Seeger? Yeah. I don't have anything against him. Honestly. Yeah. That old time rock and roll song. I just, I turn that as soon as I get his first piano keys. Yeah, I hate that song too. But overall, I think Bob Seeger is okay. He seems fine. He's a working man. Yeah. Yeah. Turn the page, baby. Oh yeah. I don't like that song either. I guess

it's like against the wind. Like a rock. Oh, I hate that song. Hollywood Nights. That's a terrible song too. You hate Bob Seeger. No, but I don't mind against the wind. Surely there's other Bob Seeger songs out there. Bob, get in touch with us and introduce me to your catalog. That would be great if he was a listener actually. Yeah. He's just got a single tear going on his cheek. All right. So where were we? We are, you're going to hold the boomerang with the V, with the elbow pointing toward you and the V pointing out away from you. And again, up and down. It's vertically oriented. Yeah. Vertically oriented, but at a slight tilt. Like you don't want it completely straight up and down. But you're not throwing it like horizontally,

like it would have frisbee. No, no. You're not going to get very far that way. No, actually, it does go up and then comes back down in a loop. It basically does. It'll do something. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. The thing is, it's kind of dangerous. So you don't want to mess around with it. Yeah. I mean, we should point that out. These things are heavy and made of wood and they come, you know, you're throwing it hard. Well, yeah. I mean, let's cut to the chase. Apparently, when you throw a frisbee or a boomerang, which are virtually interchangeable in my mind, but they're really not. They're not at all. You want to keep your eye on it at all times. And if you ever lose sight of it, you don't look around for it. You need to go take cover, cover your head

and shout heads up and get everybody else to cover their heads too, because that thing can come back and co-lock somebody. Yeah. And that's if you haven't thrown it right. Like when I've seen the correct boomerang toss, it lands like a helicopter, you know, straight up and down. So it's not completely straight up and down. What's the next step? All right. So you've got that v-point pointing away from you and you want pointing at you. No, no, no. The two, you want the point facing toward you and the v facing away from you. Okay, gotcha. And you want, it's super important, this part is, you want that flat side. Remember we talked about the airfoil. You want the flat side facing out. So to your right, if you're a right-handed thrower. Gotcha. If you don't do that right,

then you're not going to have a good result. Yeah. You would only probably tilt it to the left of the wind if you're left-handed, I would guess. I don't know about that. Okay. I don't endorse that state. Okay. So you're going to hold it at the bottom of the wing. Like they say a pinch grip, the guy in the video called his a little pistol grip, like with two fingers and a thumb. Okay. And you want to snap your wrist when you throw it. And he didn't throw it super hard. Yeah. Like you don't have to really wing it. Yeah. He didn't, he didn't sound like Steffi Graf when he threw it or anything. Monica Sellas, you mean? I thought Steffi Graf did that too. Was it Monica Sellas? Well, there's a lot of grunters, but Monica Sellas. Okay.

Every time she hit it. That's who I meant then. But she got stabbed. Look what happened to her. Oh gosh. I thought that was Steffi Graf too. No. Because you know Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi are married? Yeah. Isn't that cute? It's adorable. Okay. You would be funny as if their kids were terrible. They just trip over their rackets or whatever. Bob Seeger's their coach. That's right. He's their badminton coach. All right. So you're snapping your wrist. You're throwing it basically like a baseball at a little slight angle and you're going to snap that wrist to give it the good spin. You throw it vertically and hopefully it's going to go out and up and curve around and then land back down fairly softly somewhere close to where you are. Right.

And you don't want to try and catch it with your hand like in a cartoon. Well, you can, but you want to clap your hands together on it. Yeah. Yeah. Like don't try and catch it like a Frisbee. No, but I think if you are a boomerang throwing person, you are trying to catch each one. Oh yeah. Yeah. But you're going to do it one handed. It's you clap it together. You trap it in between your two hands. Yeah. And if you're catching a Frisbee like that, then God help you. Yeah. You're going to get laughed at. Yeah. But it's safe too. It's just you don't really have to be worried about a Frisbee. It's super safe. I don't think I have anything else. Is that it? Well, just one other thing. When I said that it's spinning around three axes,

if you were impressed with that, prepare to have your mind blown even more. It's spinning around three axes to lay down flat from the torque. Yeah. It's also spinning around an additional three axes to follow that arc in a giant circle and come back to you. So technically, a boomerang when you throw it is spinning on six different axes. From the point of release to the point of landing. Wow. Isn't that neat? It's pretty neat. Yeah. It's neat. And like this is one of those things where people were throwing these things long before we knew anything about how they actually worked. People figured them out and then science came along afterward and said, oh, well, this is how it works. But this stuff is so complex. It really kind of exposes

that moment in science where you're like, I kind of have to have faith in this. Sure. Because I understand it so thinly that I just have to have faith that this is correct. And it's almost virtually the same thing as saying, well, the great wizard is the one who's moving it around in an invisible circle back to you because he wants you to prosper and not have to make a boomerang every time. Virtually the same thing at this point in my understanding. Yeah. They're a great teaching tool as well. I imagine if you're trying to teach physics and gyroscopic procession, then the problem is everybody almost everybody I saw except for the Japanese paper, I think it was titled What Makes a Boomerang Come Back? Yeah. We're just terrible at explaining it. They

understood everything, but they could not explain it in anything approaching layman's terms. You know, I read a popular science article. I think it was called The Science of Boomerangs. It was pretty good. Wish you would have sent that to me. Oh yeah. Because I've been agonizing over this for many, many, many, many, many hours. I just figured you had your Japanese sources and were good. It was in English too. Well, of course it was. You don't read Japanese. I don't want to read Japanese so good. If you want to know more about boomerangs, you can look up stuff all over the web, but why not start at our website, howstuffworks.com. Just type that word in the search bar and it'll bring it up. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

I'm just going to call this I Split Atoms for a Living. Nice. So you know we're on the wrong track already. Yeah, we're going to be corrected. Yeah, but he's very nice about it. I split Atoms for a Living at a Nuclear Power Plant, so I was really excited that you did a podcast on a nuclear science topic. You guys really did a great job actually of breaking down a topic and making it accessible to a wide audience, something I personally feel that organizations involved with nuclear technology tend to struggle with a little bit. Anyway, I'm writing in with a correction. You stated that nuclear fission reactions involve the electromagnetic force while nuclear fusion reactions involve the strong nuclear force. I remember saying that.

Both of these reactions actually get their energy from the same strong nuclear force. In both cases, if you were to measure the mass of the material before the reaction, compare that to the material after the reaction, you would find that there is less because some of the strong nuclear force holding the atoms together was released as energy. The difference in the energy released pretty much comes down to how much of this mass was converted divided by the mass of the atoms involved. See, the thing is that makes total and complete sense if you think about it. That makes it irritating that we got it wrong.

Since atoms good for fusion are much lighter than atoms good for fission, their reactions are a bit stronger. Reactions which involve the release of stored electromagnetic energy are actually all of the reactions that involve electrons which includes chemical reactions. Since this is a much weaker force, that's why there is such a huge energy difference between burning coal and nuclear energy as you pointed out in the podcast. It's millions of times more potent. So thanks again, guys, looking forward to the next one. And that is Jeffrey Halseman. He's a reactor engineer in Zachary, Louisiana. Thank you very much. What's his name again? Jeffrey. Jeffrey. Appreciate that. We love hearing from experts in the field. Oh, yeah.

If you are an expert in your field and you want to correct us about something or whatever, we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast and join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and you can join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boybander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app,

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