1 HN user recommended this explainer1 month2022–2025score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN cites it as an intuitive demonstration of the Coriolis effect and the practical problems of spinning habitats.
Tom Scott tours the rotating room artificial gravity facility at Brandeis University's Graybiel lab. It shows how humans cope with rotation-based gravity and the odd effects such as Coriolis forces.
“I never really got it until I watched the Tom Scott video” (HN, 2023)
The idea is much older for example 1948: [link] Various test chambers for astronauts where built to test how people respond to higher gravity / a rotating reference frame. Actually trying to do this runs into some unexpected issues in practice. Here is a Tom Scott video about a more recent example: [this video]
Tom Scott tours a rotating lab showing practical problems of artificial gravity.
EMS = electro muscular stimulation? No, not 100%. Astronauts have very good resistance training onboard the ISS at this point. Some of them come back to earth stronger than they left. However, it turns out that your body also needs skeletal loading in order to produce strong bones. That kind of loading comes from having large forces distributed through the entire body. NASA tried a variety of shortcuts around resistance training, but none of them were satisfactory. A spinning drum is probably the best method short of artificial gravity, but it has a couple problems. A rotating reference frame creates some pretty non-intuitive effects ( [this video] ). Research is ongoing about just how fast a human can be spun for a long duration, although data is hard to come by. We also don't know how low of a gravity a human can stay healthy in without intervention like serious exercise. If it turns out that you need 1G, that involves a much larger spinning drum than a G/3 (Mars) or G/6 (Moon) environment. The problem is that we really have no way to simulate those environments for a human.
Shows non-intuitive effects of living in a rotating reference frame.
Relevant Scott Manley video: [link] Relevant tom Scott video: [this video] There is a lot of research, but it’s not as simple as operating under real gravity. Makes many movements harder and can result in getting sick.
Shows spinning gravity makes movement harder and can cause sickness.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
5 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more