Scotland's Magical Hill Where Cars Defy Gravity and Roll Upwards
Scotland seems like a very magical place, with those misty moors that are surely hiding a witches' den or tree full of fairies... but while we're still on the hunt for these magical creatures, there is one place that you can visit and see real life magic before your eyes: Electric Brae in Ayrshire, where cars parked in neutral and soccer balls roll uphill instead of downhill. What is this magic? Continue reading to find out.
If you're after some more magical/science stories, check out this Dark Energy telescope that can see into the past.
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Starting a stick-shift car on an upwards slope can be really difficult, and if you're not careful you can easily start sliding backwards before you begin to drive. However, if you're driving up the Electric Brae, you'll have the opposite effect: your car will roll uphill (in the direction the woman is pointing to in the GIF).
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But how on Earth is this possible? What is happening here? People have actually been asking this question for centuries. The seemingly magical occurrence, which is called a gravity hill, hasn't gone unnoticed by people over the years and until modern science became popular, there were many interesting theories behind this phenomenon.
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The most popular theories include the magnetic pull of the land, rich minerals in the soil, fairies, unexplained magic similar to the Bermuda Triangle, and most commonly (and this is where the hill got its official name), electricity. In the early days of electricity, folks in Ayrshire didn't know much about the nature of electricity and attributed it's strange power to the mysterious behavior of this hill (which would have pulled horse-drawn carts uphill in those days rather than cars).
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But science like to bust theories of magic, and that's exactly what happened at Electric Brae. As you can see here, the road is on a slope, making it look like the cars driving to the right are going downhill. But what you see is actually an optical illusion. Sorry to all the conspiracy theorists out there.
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Although the road appears to be running uphill, it only looks that way: the configuration of the land on either side of the slope makes it appear as if the slope is going the other way. Therefore, a stationary ball or car will appear as though it is rolling uphill, when it is actually following the laws of gravity and rolling downhill.
And that's the mystery solved! Not saying that we don't believe in magic, but in this case, science has a stronger argument. (There's no scientific explanation for Harry Potter though...)
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