Relying On What You Know When You Find Something You Don't

The Gauss's Gun gave the teachers a significant amount of difficulty. One reason they had such difficulty was that they wanted to be able to physically experience where the energy was coming from. The teachers kept referring to the theory that the incoming ball would accelerate up to the magnet and the amount of energy in the instant right before it collides with the magnet was proportional to the energy of the ball that was being ejected from the other side. They went about this in a fairly professional way. They noted that some energy would be lost in friction and sound but that was a minuscule amount. So they summed up their inability to prove their theory to the lack of sufficient instruments to measure the speed of the approaching ball and the ejected ball.

The teachers' flaw in their investigative work, though it may not have been the route the instructors had in mind, was why would the instructors give them this experiment to explain without the tools to explain it? And if it is just a conservation of kinetic energy then why use this instead of just the Newton's cradle? 

But the moment that struck my attention the most, and I believe it even caught SV off guard was a question that Todd asked. Todd was off screen when he said this and he was away from a mic. But while some of the more verbal teachers were trying to figure out the energy transfer in the Gauss's Gun, Todd called the attention of the whole class. He asked, "If I had two magnets, one I use to pull things with all the time, and the other I keep put away in a wooden box, after many years if I were to measure these two magnets would they still have equal magnetic forces?" Very exciting question. While the other's teachers were concentrated on trying to understand the set up, Todd asked a question that concentrated on a basic but mysterious characteristic of magnets. I couldn't hear his reasoning for his question but I thought his different approach to the topic could have been very useful.

Rance