During my visit at the MCM Comic Con, I stopped by the stand for the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), showing a number of simple experiments based of physics and the way the brain determines something. Everything on the stand was free to interact with and a silly little game of stacking the SI Bots, these are the coloured robots they have to represent different SI Units.

The stacking of the SI Bots was possibly one of the trickier things, if you could stack all 7, you got a whole pack of them, with 4, you got to take one home. I only managed to stack 4, which was an accomplishment for my incredibly unstable hands! I chose one of the pink ones to take home. But one of the other reasons it was difficult, each one was 3D printed and had imperfections, though some people did manage it.

On the stall were two experiments to have a go at, the first of these was the dolls of confusion, STEM have a page on this, which you can find here. The aim is to sort each doll by how heavy you think it is, each is a different size, which impacts how heavy it feels. It wasn't until after I had sorted them, that I realised what was actually going on with this, the brain is easily confused.

The second of the experiments, there was a blue weighted object, which you pick up and you can feel the mass. When picked up with two identical looking objects, it felt like paper. The two identical objects did not have a significant mass, which tricks the brain. When picking up all three, you expect it to be 3x the weight as a single one, but the lack of weight of the other two really throws the brain off!

While it wasn't a main part of the MCM Comic Con, it was interesting all the same, small and simple experiments can be some of the most interesting. You can read about SI Base Units on the NPL website here and you can look round the website for other bits of information!

WRITTEN & EDITED BY Three of Seven - rena.hobden@ufplanets.com