Paraffin Paradox 

This man is a good teacher, he makes you think about what your doing instead of explaining what your doing

A real scientist would break it for science.

Paraffin 'puzzle' might have been a better description rather than a 'paradox'. That would have saved about a million superfluous posts.

It's white That's a nice observation

Yes the wax block is super simple, especially since he showed how to make it, but it's actually only a prop for the real lesson in this video, which is the method of teaching and asking questions that he is explaining along the way. What he's doing is teaching the teachers how to teach a class effectively. And to be honest, if I had not seen the wax block being made, I would certainly be curious enough and impressed enough to go along with making the observations and theories and trying to figure it out. It's pretty cool!

I dunno why this was in my recommended feed, but it was very calming to watch.

This Instructor is a phenomenal Speaker. Seriously. He goes from point A to Z so seamlessly. Well Done!

Some students may say, "sir, I need to go to the toilet!"

"It's cheap." "Why?" "Because you have one."

It's good that he's wearing those safety goggles. Blocks of paraffin have been known to go for the eyes.

i accidentally watched this whole thing. and i felt unwittingly calm afterwards. and then i accidentally liked and subscribed.

The paradox is the perceived difference in color, and the colors remaining the same on the top and bottom, even when flipped. (The paradox spoiler) We were not supposed to see the blocks being prepared. We are not supposed to know that there is a piece of foil in between them. This video appears to be made for other instructors as a demonstration on how to teach the scientific method. So Imagine not knowing why the blocks change color. THAT would be a paradox.

So glad he wore his safety goggles around all that wax.

Very nice tool for teaching a method. After nearly 60 years as a scientist I would also ask you to remind the students over and over again that their hypotheses are just and only that. Just because an idea provides a very good explanation for a given phenomenon does not mean that the idea is correct. It is just one of perhaps many possible explanations. This basic concept gets forgotten in science and causes a great deal of unnecessary confusion and a lot of "barking up the wrong tree." Thank you for your efforts.

He's even wearing a green shirt like Mr. Mackey lol..

MMMKAY? MMMKAY...

This is a logical paradox people, not a physical paradox. Designed to teach that things that defy standard logic can be explained and "figured out" using simple methods of observation and thinking out of the box. Great video.

what is the paradox?

"Is there something specific you would like me to do with the flashlight?" I think that sentence might be "problematic" with a class of 12 year olds. *LOL*

This is an example of great teaching. He's not teaching his students the answers to a test. He's giving them tools they can apply to every type of problem or question. Indirectly He's teaching logic, critical thinking, problem solving, how to recognize biases and incomplete reasonjng, and ultimately the scientific method. It can take a lifetime of effort to overcome personal biases, but if you learn early enough that you are jumping to unfounded conclusions and engaging in confirmation bias, you will save yourself a whole lot of unlearning most have to go thru later in life, if ever.

IMO You should have shown us how to set it up after. So we as the audience could go through the thought process with you.

love that he is wearing goggles

apparently the paradox is that there is no paradox...

People are making comments on the block itself, while the whole purpose of the video is in the teaching method. This is a 3rd grade teaching material, and this guy did a good job in demonstrating it

He's calling it a "paradox" because of the "white on top, black on bottom" thing. The students are lead to believe that the block is opaque and that one side is white and one is black, meaning that if you inverted the black, the white side should be on the bottom. It stays on the top, and that's the paradox. Obviously the block isn't actually opaque, hence the misunderstanding in the students. A paradox is just something that's unintuitive. There aren't any "real" paradoxes which are actual logical contradictions with themselves. That doesn't exist.

ah, the famous pair-o-blocks paradox

This is absolutely fascinating. I didn't get to take chemistry in high school.. I think I'm going to end up watching all of these.. so, thank you.

This video is 10 years old. It is my observation that in 2023 most ALL fields of science needs to return to this class on proper scientific method for a refresher.

we did something like this in seventh grade. our teacher gave us little wooden boxes and we had to figure out what's inside by comprising or own experiments. At the end, she didn't tell us what really was inside them.

I really hope this guy is an elementary school teacher. this is so painfully slow

I like this style of teaching. You don't provide information, just clever questions and tools that lead to an answer. Introducing the flashlight and then asking "Is there any way you would like me to use this to make an observation?" is a nice ironically Socratic way to teach this subject.

It’s a perfectly fine and engaging pedagogical video to me. Why would it have 12K dislikes to only 30K likes?

"Is their something you'd like me to do with the flashlight?" Indeed, find the class gerbil that vanished.....

we need the myth busters to blow it up

Phil I've worked with paraffin wax but this for manufacturing Chavant hard styling clay for the automobile industry and the resins used was a smelly affair especially when you use Portuguese resin, Japanese wax and adding Zinc oxide for the mix to catalyse the whole mixture once poured into metal moulds . The following day measure 72 kg of grease put into a dough making machine after 40 minutes you add 120kg of sulphur powder into the mix just before a 15 mins a clay dyed additive is added and volia your Chavant clay . It was a smelly job to do when you boil red oil steric acid produced from beef and mutton fat .

Are you happy youtube? I finally clicked on it, you can stop recommending it to me even though all I ever watch on youtube are memes and music videos

This actually is fascinating. If you think of it as an model of how scientists study the world around us, making experiments until there is a theory that stands up to all their experiments.

Critical thinking is difficult when you are not used to doing it. He leads the class through the thinking process and that is why it seems so painfully slow. I think he is a good teacher.

I don't know what paraffin paradox is, but I think it is when youtube recommends something you don't wanna watch, but you still watched it till the end anyway and comment on it.

I miss when science was based on verifiable observation. Today we're told to ignore the obvious and they call it "science". This was a pleasure to watch and reminded me of my high school science teachers.

This was uploaded 3 years ago... All comments are from a few hours ago. Why?!

Call this the paraffin problem or observation or conundrum, but not paradox.

So many armchair scientists getting a hard-on discussing if the word 'Paradox' is well chosen or not. But no one can actually appreciate that this is a nice way to introduce people into the scientific method.

Everytime he says „Aluminum“ i die a little inside

Actually I enjoy what most will say are "nitpicky questions" like "shine the light how?" when you are testing things you can't assume anything. Proper documentation and observation are critical. Interesting video.

Why is this on my recommended list?

I am very impressed. As I've gotten older and gained a well-earned appreciation for the scientific method, I knew the answers for this demonstration. I want to thank Mr. Stevens for giving me a failing grade when I didn't finish the assignment of collecting bugs for my 7th grade science project. I earned the failing grade; I also learned several years later about the importance of entomology and the role that it has in the overall ecosystem. I am grateful that Mr. Stevens held me to the same standard as anyone else. Athletes don't get a repreve regardless of the level at which they compete. Also, stay hydrated. Super important.

Oh dear. I watched this third grade video now I'll be getting "FlinnScientific" forever

The paradox is how you lose 10 minutes of your life!

I came for a paradox

I had Mr. Long as a chemistry teacher while he was employed at Rogers high school.....will never forget the wind/air science

My 10th grade chemistry teacher had one of these sitting on a table. He never did a demonstration or anything that I can remember, but he told me what it was when I asked about it.

Why did youtube tell me to watch this???

Good thing he was wearing safety glasses ...

Don't know why there are so many downvotes. This is a great way to approach the scientific method.

THIS IS PERFECT! The world's best teaching comes from situations like this :) I love this! So much!!!

I think you left out the most important part, testing your hypothesys and peer review. That wold made a good lesson better.

k I think I'm not dumb but I still don't see the paradox

I came for a paradox, I stayed for the ASMR.

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach teachers." This man does not fit that mold.

Take the wax. Put it on your skis or snowboard. Go ride on the snow.

Why is he wearing safety glasses the whole time? It's not a paradox in any sense.

Plot twist There was no class. He was just asking questions to himself.

this man sounds like google voice

(dont delete)it's not a paradox bcuz you put aluminum in between the block and bcuz light is not goin to pass thru the aluminum the bottom half is darker and lighter colour on the top bcuz the light from the light bulb is shining on the top and the top part absorbs most light and the bottom absorbs less light Thus it's not a paradox :)

the paradox is that he's wearing those safety glasses for no apparent reason

The reason why the top bar appear brighter than the lower bar is because lighting. Light coming from the ceiling (light source like fluorescent or incandescent light) passes through the top bar and "touches" the aluminum foil and bounces back up.

Well there's ten minutes of your life that you will never get back

I've gotta say, at the end when you say you "don't like to teach 'the' scientific method," I really respect and appreciate that. As a science teacher a lot of people might at first assume that statement is sacrilege, but I get what you're saying. Instead of teaching 'the' "one" scientific method that everyone knows, you're allowing room for other equally valid methods, but furthermore, you're also specifically teaching your students *how* to think as opposed to *what* to think, and man that's such an important distinction, probably more important in the science lab than anywhere else. So much of public school, in my experience, was being taught 'what' to think- being forced to memorize and regurgitate facts as opposed to understanding concepts and events, and that just didn't work well for me. I get that there are time restraints with what, 200 days in a school year? Less? Anyway, I caught the distinction you made about " 'the' scientific method" vs 'method's of scientific exploration' and I admire that approach and wanted to say something about it.

There is no Paradox in this video...

Have the students form a hypothesis, then ask them to think of further experiments to validate their guesses? (eg, shine a laser at an angle into the block, and see the results?)

I think only one step is missing here, and it's that the guesses should have been challenged eventually. So if someone says that the thing is so because of some reason and another says something else, ask them to challenge each other on it and let them figure out a variant of the experiment that would falsify their own or each other's positions. Then carry out that test for them. It's important to include the deductive element in the scientific method, after all.

i hope this is for grade 8 students cause this is too simple to be baffled about

Where's the paradox in this? O.o

What grade is this meant for? It seems like I should've learned this around 6th or 7th grade but he said that they might use some big words they learned down around physical science which for my middle school was 8th grade.

now lets learn about the methamphetamin paradox

This is not exactly a paradox. It's more accurately called a puzzle.

For two minutes iI was yelling at my screen "FLIP IT OVER". lol

i kinda wish they showed this for photography classes because while it's nice for science, it may help students learn some of the effects of light on opaque objects. (like the fact that a shirt of any color casts light onto objects and we don't realize it as much as we probably should.) I dunno maybe i'm reaching a little but honestly this would be a fun learning tool (the object more so than the way he's teaching it, not that it's a bad way of teaching scientific method, just that i'm referring to the object)

ok, soo when does it blow up?

I would say that is fooling around with students

If you pay attention in the beginning you see that the 2 blocks exhibit this light dark character even before he places the foil in it.

He certain has a knack for making a long story seemingly endless

The problem with his presentation is the 'no kid left behind' which translates into the kids sitting there like a bump on a log giving zero response.

Why is he wearing safety glasses beyond the point of melting the wax?

Haha I wish he didn't show us how he made it so I could guess.

Interesting project. I've seen something similar with alabaster stone. A deep crack in the stone causes something similar, in that light will not pass cleanly through, and you get a light and dark side to the stone. I've used this to determine how bad the cracks are, and if i'll need to soak the piece in superglue to shore up a bad crack midway through carving.

All I could think as he put it together is, "Huh, he's making a chemistry grilled cheese..."

basically you want students to use common sense to analyze something/someone for scientific research,the question is how far can you go to analyze something without destroying the entire thing

This is not a paradox, very easily explainable. It deals with the refraction of light given from the ceiling and the foil on the inside. Wherever the light source is will determine the lighter side.

Most people would come to the same conclusion that there is no way of knowing what is inside the parrifin as we can not destroy it. What I would say is, "As the light seems to only shine half way through the material on each side and the material itself seems to allow light to shine through but never to the other side, I would be forced to assume that there is some kind of material entrapped within the block that doesn't allow light to shine past it. Meaning something inside, unlike the outside, is neither transparent, translucent, or opaque. "

It is a 'paradox' because it is something that has 2 contradicting sides or elements. It absolutely fits the meaning. For all the dummies with bloated but shallow intellectual ego, harping on pride for knowing the simple meaning of paradox, this is an old method in chemistry used as an exercise to teach certain elements of observation, hypothesis, and report. Believing you know better than someone else, especially an expert in the field, and believing you are more intellectual than someone else handicaps your ability for critical thinking. Had any of the people that disliked this, at face value, paid any attention , they may have learned some basics about science, and the humility required as an observer in science in order to correctly discern things. The fact that you couldn't discern the value or object of the exercise should make you question the high intelligence you presume to have.

I would enjoy to have teachers like him

Does he realise 90% of the students will stop caring because he's doing in a 40-60 minute lesson, what you could do in 2-5 minutes, guess you've gotta fill all of that mandated time with something. He could've at least gone through what defined rational & irrational observations and establishing priori.

Wow, there are a lot of dislikes for a video that is pretty straightforward and educational.

I don't know about you guys but all of my science teachers were way beyond this man... we covered observations like this in first and second grade

light passes through the top block but is stopped by the aluminium sheet which casts a shadow on the block below making it look dark.

Where's the paradox?

1.5 speed has never been more appriciated

What a great teaching example. Such a demo could serve one their entire life.