In 1851, Léon Foucault hung a 28-kilogram ball from a 67-metre wire beneath the dome of the Panthéon in Paris. The pendulum kept swinging in the same plane while the floor turned beneath it, so over the hours its path seemed to rotate. For the first time, Earth's rotation could be seen without looking at the sky.
Cooled below −183 °C, oxygen turns into a pale blue liquid. Pour it between the poles of a strong magnet and, instead of flowing away, it hangs suspended between them. The reason lies in its unpaired electrons, which respond to the magnetic field. Liquid nitrogen, by contrast, is colourless and pours straight through.
In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a capsule hanging beneath a balloon, about 39 kilometres up. In that extremely thin air almost nothing slowed him down, and he reached around 1,358 km/h in free fall, or Mach 1.25. He became the first person to exceed the speed of sound with nothing but his own body.