Well, sort of ...
First, an anecdote from my college days while taking elementary physics.
I was fortunate enough to have "tutors" in the form of mechanical engineers while I was working and attending college. Almost every day included a science lesson of some sort.
As an interesting project, I was encouraged to create a device which consisted of a single spring, similar to the slinky and a cylindrical mass attached to the bottom of the spring with the top of the spring attached to a rigid support.
The spring constants, the weight of the cylindrical mass and the moment of inertia about its axis were chosen to accomplish a system of two linked oscillators.
One oscillator stored energy alternately in the extension or compression of the spring and in the vertical motion of the mass. In an idealized spring-mass system, the spring constant and the weight allow one to calculate the frequency of oscillation.
The "twist" in this project was to select the mass such that the torsional spring constant and the moment of inertia of the mass about its vertical axis would form a torsional spring-mass system. In this system, the energy would alternately be stored in the twisting of the spring and in the angular momentum of the mass as it rotated about its vertical axis.
By a suitable choice of diameter for the cylindrical mass, it was possible to create a system of two linked oscillators, the natural frequencies of which differed by a small amount.
The result could be observed by pulling the mass downward and releasing it to impart the initial energy to the system. After several vertical oscillations, the magnitude of the vertical motion would decrease, eventually reaching zero. During the decrease in magnitude of the vertical oscillations, the spring was delivering energy into the torsional spring-mass system. The mass would begin rotating first one way about the vertical axis and then reverse to the opposite direction.
The secret to the effect was the fact that a helical spring must "unwind" a little bit as it is stretched. Each coil, being further from its neighbors when the spring is stretched, must cover a greater distance. The stretching of the spring creates a twisting force. This force is reversed when the spring is unstretched. Each stretching of the spring in the spring-mass system I described transfers a bit of the energy which was in the vertically translating mass into rotation of the mass about the vertical axis.
The above description explains why we see the twisting of the slinky in the video as the compression of the slinky changes.
The other key observation I would make concerns the fact that the slinky has no "mass" attached to the bottom of it. In a classical spring-mass system, the spring is typically mass-less. The spring-constant describes the extension or compression of the mass-less spring when acted upon by an external force, typically a mass acting under the effects of gravity.
In the slinky video, the spring is not mass-less. The extension of the slinky is entirely due to ITS OWN mass. The result is that the upper coils of the slinky are far apart due to the fact that these coils are supporting the entire slinky. To a first-approximation, the coils at the center of the slinky should be half as far apart, since those coils are supporting only the half of the slinky that hangs below them. The coils at the bottom are supporting hardly any mass at all.
Suspending the slinky as it is in the video results in a non-uniform extension of the spring, with the extension starting at zero at the bottom of the slinky and rising linearly to a value at the top which can be predicted by knowing the spring constant of the slinky.
Now imagine for a moment that we could somehow take this slinky, in its non-uniformly extended state, and place it in a space without a gravitational field. Recall that the extension of the spring at the top was exactly that which was needed to counteract the affect of gravity on the bottom of the spring. Without the gravitational field, that spring force would be that which would accelerate the bottom of the spring at 32 feet per second per second toward the center of mass of the spring.
The top of the spring would accelerate toward the center of mass of the spring at a greater rate, that which would result in the center of mass remaining still, since the spring is not being acted upon externally.
When the slinky is released as in the video, the bottom of the spring is accelerating toward the center of mass of the spring at 32 feet per second per second. At the same time, the center of mass of the spring is accelerating toward the center of the earth at 32 feet per second per second. The two accelerations cancel exactly at the bottom of the spring, causing the bottom to be motionless in the non-accelerating frame of reference which is the earth. The bottom of the spring IS accelerating in the frame of reference of the moving center of mass of the slinky.
I do have a question on the The extension of the slinky is entirely due to ITS OWN mass.
Is this still a correct statement when you lay the slinky on its side (Xing out old slinkies will want to flop on their ends)?
Thanks again for the great post.