The "Flip Your Phone" Challenge

Can you flip your phone front-to-back, and make it land face-up the way it started? There's a reason why this is so difficult to do, and physics has the answer! I break down the intermediate axis theorem to look at the forces involved. This explanation is based on the clever write-up (and its update) by the mathematician Terry Tao: https://ve42.co/Tao

“Ellipsoids and The Bizarre Behaviour of Rotating Bodies” by Stand-up Maths
   • Ellipsoids and The Bizarre Behaviour of Ro...  

The phone animations are approximate and simplified or exaggerated for clarity. This video is not intended to be a rigorous or quantitative treatment of the intermediate axis theorem.

Special thanks to David Murphy for doing the heavy lifting on the Blender models.

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