Fidget spinners spin because of basic physics.
Credit: idan gamliel/Shutterstock
Fidget
spinners ― kids spin them and spin them ― and while parents may not "get" why the boomerang-shaped toys have caught on with such force, there's real physics to explain how the distracting devices work.
"I was introduced to fidget spinners a few months ago by professor Kenneth Brecher from BU [Boston University]," said Paul Doherty, a physicist at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. "He makes his own spinning toys and handed me a fidget spinner and asked me to guess what it was. I described what it did but had no idea why someone would buy one ;-)," Doherty told Live Science in an email.
For Doherty, the spinners are interesting for another reason: "To me, these show the coolness of ball bearings that reduce friction and allow things to rotate freely for a long time." (On a basic level, friction is the resistance to motion that occurs when one object moves relative to another.) [Why Fidget Spinners Are So Hot (and Where to Buy Them)] https://www.livescience.com/58963-how-fidget-spinners-work-physics.html
