yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Chain Drop Answer 2


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

All right, are you ready for the moment of truth? Let's drop these two objects at exactly the same time and see which one hits the ground first. Ready? 3, 2, 1. Wow! Did you see that? The one connected to the chain landed just before the other free weight. I'd like to show this in slow motion so you can see that the weights are accelerating at just slightly different rates.

[Music] Go! Oh, why did that happen? I mean, most people, most students of physics, would know that all objects on Earth's surface should accelerate down at the same rate: 9.8 m/s squared. But in this case, what happens is the chain actually whips the weight around, so it accelerates at a rate greater than the acceleration of objects when in free fall. That's a pretty remarkable result.

I want you to think about the bend in the chain as the weight descends. The chain goes from falling to becoming stationary, so it's accelerating up. The tension required to accelerate the chain up actually pulls down on the weight, accelerating it at a rate greater than the acceleration due to gravity, and that's why it hits the ground first.

Now, this actually happens to bungee jumpers. If the weight of the rope is appreciable, they will actually accelerate down at a rate faster than free fall, faster than 9.8 m/s squared. When I went bungee jumping, I was aware of this. What is actually true is that as you fall, your acceleration will be greater than free fall, and that's due to some, uh, effects of the way the rope pulls on you.

So I'll do an explanation of that later when I'm not scared out of my mind. Oh my God! I couldn't figure out what the acceleration was as I was going down, but you know, it fell high. It fell very fast—very great increase in your rate of speed. So, oh my God, that was fast! Loved it!

More Articles

View All
How to FLY A SPACESHIP to the SPACE STATION - Smarter Every Day 131
Hey, it’s me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. Most people know that if you’re gonna go to the International Space Station, you first get on this rocket in Russia called the Soyuz. You strap yourself in, you launch from Baikonur and you go straig…
Peter Lynch: How to Achieve a 30% Return Per Year
I’m amazed how many people own stocks. They would not be able to tell you why they own it. They couldn’t say in a minute or less why they own it. If you really press them down, they’d say the reason I own this is, “The sucker’s going up,” and that’s the o…
Graphing negative number addition and subtraction expressions | 7th grade | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to add and subtract negative numbers on a number line. The important thing to realize is if you are adding a positive number, you start at some point on the number line and you move that many units to the right. If you are addin…
Worked example: Relating reaction stoichiometry and the ideal gas law | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
So we’re told that silver oxide decomposes according to the following equation. For every two moles of silver oxide, it decomposes into four moles of silver and one mole of molecular oxygen. How many grams of silver oxide are required to produce 1.50 lit…
Fundraising Advice from Female Founders
Okay, hi everyone! Next part of the session is going to be a fundraising panel where we have three ladies from the Seattle scene who are going to impart some advice on how they’ve approached fundraising and some of the lessons that they’ve learned. My n…
Warm up to the second partial derivative test
So, in single variable calculus, if you have a function f of x and you want to find the maximum or the minimum of this function, what you do is you find its derivative and you set that equal to zero. Graphically, this has the interpretation that, you know…