What if someone told you that no matter how hard you blow into a funnel, you cannot dislodge a ping pong ball inside it? If you think it’s a fib, try it for yourself.

What you need:

• A plastic conical funnel
• A ping pong ball

What to do:

1. Put the ping pong ball into the funnel.

2. Now, tilt your head back and put the thin pipe of the funnel against your mouth. Start blowing air into it.

3. While blowing air, move your head forward so that the wide cone of the funnel is facing the floor.

What happens:

The ping pong ball stays in the funnel. It does not fall to the floor as long as you keep blowing through the narrow end.

Why?

Daniel Bernoulli, an 18th-century Swiss mathematician and physicist, is remembered for giving us something known as Bemoulli’s Principle that applies to moving fluids (since air flows, it is also considered a fluid).

According to this principle, the faster air flows over a surface, the less it pushes on the surface i.e., the pressure exerted by the air on that surface decreases.

When you blow air through the narrow part of the funnel (and the wide part of the funnel faces the floor), you create a low air pressure zone above the ping pong ball due to the fast-moving air. This means that the air below the ball and the air all around it has higher pressure or push. That is how the ball is pushed towards the narrow part and stays in the funnel. Of course, that only lasts until your lungs run out of air!

Picture Credit : Google