Digital Films

Parallel Transport (Quicktime)
small format (700 KB)

A silly short film about two of my favourite topics: Star Trek and Differential Geometry, immortalised together during the first season of TNG.

The Amazing Levitron (Quicktime)
small format (11,625 KB) | medium format (56,081 KB)

This is a 3-minute video (without any editing) of the Levitron in action.

This fascinating toy illustrates a number of intersting concepts in dynamics. For the mathematically minded, I recommend the following papers:

• Michael Berry, The Levitron: an adiabatic trap for spins, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A (1996) 452, 1207-1220.
• Holger Dullin and Robert Easton, Stability of levitrons, Physica D 126 (1999), 1-17.