Rube Goldberg Physics
A WebQuest for High School Physics
Designed by
Louis Nadelson
Introduction | Task | Process | Evaluation | Conclusion | Credits | Teacher Page
Introduction
Physics involves many observations and equations, and students will study it for a year or two in high school to develop a fundamental understanding of the science. Yet, physics is all around us and there is few better examples of the application of physics than a Rube Goldberg machine.
The Rube Goldberg Machine Contest is named after cartoonist Reuben Lucius Goldberg, the spirit of whose work inspires the contest's weird machines and crazy mechanism. For 55 years Goldberg's award-winning cartoons satirized machines and gadgets which he saw as excessive. His cartoons combined simple machines and common household items to create complex, wacky, and diabolically logical machines that accomplished mundane and trivial tasks. His inventions became so widely known that Webster's Dictionary added "rube goldberg" to its listing, defining it as "accomplishing by extremely complex, roundabout means what seemingly could be done simply."
During his life, Goldberg's drawings included sports cartoons, comic strips, and political cartoons, but he is best known today for his ridiculously complex machines.
His "inventions," drawn for our pleasure, can actually work. By inventing excessively complex ways to accomplish simple tasks, he entertained us and poked fun at the gadgets designed to make our lives easier. In his words, the machines were a "symbol of man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results." He believed that most people preferred doing things the hard way instead of using simpler, more direct path s to accomplish goals.
There are contest every year in which groups of students create Rube Goldberg machines to accomplish various tasks. (Purdue University Rube Goldberg Contest)
Last updated 07/08/2004 13:26:24 -0700
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