I was sweating it out this week, alongside David Griego, a retired Mora High School mathematics teacher. We were at the Abe Montoya Recreation Center. I wondered why he wasn’t even breathing hard while striding on his treadmill. With his 150-pound frame, he didn’t sweat at all.
But I, weighing possibly 65 pounds more, wondered why I was having such a hard time. Think about it: the treadmill has a powerful motor capable of moving the belt more than 12 mph. Why, then, do humans exert any effort at all, when it’s the machine that’s doing all the work?
It reminds me of the time when I was 5 and Mom would say, “Arthur, stop pulling the cat’s tail.” I would reply, “I’m just holding his tail; the cat’s doing all the pulling.”
So that led me to think about things physical. And the timing is perfect.
In just a few days, a bunch of celebrants will ring in the new year by pointing their guns and rifles skyward and firing them, at the stroke of midnight. What’s wrong with this practice? Did you see the movie “The Mexican,” with Brat Pitt, in which a landing bullet entered the skull of an innocent celebrant, killing him instantly?
Naturally, that seemed far-fetched until David explained that a bullet traveling upward leaves the bore at its fastest speed, travels a certain distance, stops and comes back down, gaining speed according to some formula posited by Sir Isaac Newton. What I found hardest to believe was that as the bullet hits the ground (or someone’s head), it is moving at the same speed at which it was fired.
It’s a variation of the question of whether a penny dropped from atop the Empire State Building can kill a pedestrian on the ground.
I used to believe that heavy objects fall faster than similar but lighter objects. As a dues-paying member of the Society of Doubters, I’m in good company. Aristotle also believed that heavier things fall faster. Let’s assume someone drops a billiard ball off a cliff as someone else drops a 20-pound bowling ball. They land at exactly the same instant.
But it just can’t be. Why? Well, because!
So I recalled the recent case in which Tracinda Foxe, 30, dropped her infant from a burning third-floor apartment in the Bronx, and he was caught by Felix Vazquez, who plays catcher for his employer’s baseball team. I decided to do some research of my own, accolades aside.
Let’s assume the baby, Eric Guzman, fell 32 feet. The question is: given Newton’s law, and an approximate weight of 8 pounds for a baby a month old, how effectively heavy was the baby and how fast was he traveling when caught by Vazquez?
An object falls 32 feet per second and doubles its speed in the second second, quadruples its speed in three seconds, etc. At the end of the fall, the infant is traveling 45 feet per second, about 32 mph and carries an effective force of 75 pounds.
In addition, the hero needed to cushion the fall, making sure the baby’s deceleration wasn’t too sudden, lest they both be seriously injured. These kinds of statistics makes one wish we all lived on the ground floor.
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Another puzzler that I can’t fully comprehend is the riddle about time and place. Here goes: Assume you begin a hike up Beaver Creek trail on Hermit’s Peak, at 8 a.m Saturday. You stay on the trail but take several breaks along the way, until you reach the summit, say, at 4 p.m. You stay overnight.
The next day you head downhill at 8 a.m. and though you are able to travel much faster, you go at whatever pace you desire, and arrive at, say, 2 p.m. Is there a place on the trail where you are able to say, truthfully, “I was at exactly this same spot at exactly the same time yesterday”? Many people will say it’s only remotely possible. But others say such a co-incidence is guaranteed.
Here’s how: Imagine you were atop the hill and instructed your twin or clone to head up the mountain at 8 a.m. while you headed down. Staying on the trail, you and your clone would meet at some point, and that meeting would be at an exact time and place.
Explained this way, it starts to make sense to me, but it’s not really a question for a physicist but rather a philosopher or a mystic. Some might say a shrink.
One person conducted the experiment. Hooked up by cell phone, he got his clone to climb the peak as he himself descended. They met him at a certain place and time. But running into poison oak and stumbling several times, the clone vented his spleen when they met and unloosed a torrent of obscenities: “Why the @#%! did you have me @#%! climb this @#%!#@* mountain?”
Upset by such language, the “original” pushed his clone down the mountain, but in a fit of remorse, called him on his cell phone to make sure he was okay, and asked, “Can you hear me now?” The police never got involved in this case, but Verizon discontinued the man’s phone service. Why?
Obviously it was because the man had made an obscene clone fall.