The video, posted about a year ago, went viral, and John Biggins, a Cambridge physicist, saw it.
He had been talking with another physicist at Cambridge, Mark Warner, about a project Dr. Warner was working on, an online course to improve physics education in high school. Dr. Biggins brought the chain fountain video to Dr. Warner’s attention and they agreed it was an ideal problem to present to students because it involved Newtonian physics, not some extreme variant of string theory or quantum mechanics.
Then they realized that they didn’t actually understand it.