A Japanese miner climbs onto the stage, his helmet light bobbing and a pickax slung over his shoulder. He swings the pick a few times before kneeling to inspect something unusual and then worries at some loose rubble with his hands. Suddenly his face lights up, and he turns to the audience, his newfound riches held forward in his open hands. “I have discovered a new supermagnet that attracts wood,” he announces. Okaaaay....
A video begins playing overhead, and the audience sees four wood balls rolling uphill in open defiance of the laws of gravity. Pulled by a magnet? Not really. The “miner” is mathematical engineer Kokichi Sugihara of the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences in Kawasaki, Japan, and his magnetlike slopes illusion is the winner of the 2010 Best Illusion of the Year Contest. The trick is exposed when the video shows Sugihara’s slopes from a different vantage point: the wood balls are actually rolling down, not up. The slopes are cleverly designed to produce the antigravity illusion when seen from a specific point of view.
This article was originally published with the title 10 Top Illusions.
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Add CommentWest of Knoxville, Tn, on interstate 40, one can find a spot where gravity is defied. Stop your car and put it in neutral and let off the brake - the car rolls up hill. There is a bit of a natural illusion taking place there. Its really cool.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReading the title: "10 top illusions", I thought Scientific American was going to list humanity's most treasured illusions, such as belief in an "after-life" or that we are the pinnacle of evolution, or we are the center of the universe, or global warming can be ignored...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr that government spending brings prosperity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr that we are better off with higher priced "green energy".
You are confusing "Illusion" with "Delusion". An illusion is a visual phenom. while beliefs like life after Death are considered Delusions, by arrogant types that think they know things they cannot possibly know. Its best to take the Agnostic position, unless you yourself have managed to resurrect yourself and can offer proof either way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut how can we ever know for 'sure' whether something is an illusion, delusion or true?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIllusions are simple to reveal, as we simply study the background or talk to the one who invented the illusion in the first place. Delusions are not as easy, and for that we need more than a consensus of opinion. The Idea that blacks are not as intelligent as whites is considered a mistaken belief and therefor a Delusion, but many refuse to give this one up, despite studies on environment that prove this to be false. The area of Philosophy known as Epistemology studies questions of "What can we know?" and "How do we know we know something, or what is information?" Claude Shannon, a Mathematician, defined "information" for us when he invented Information Theory. Truth, is not definable. When Pontius Pilot asked Jesus the question: "what is truth?" Jesus did not answer...or so we are told. Truth cannot be defined as more than experience or data from measurements.
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