Question: You and a friend are entering an egg-throwing contest. The goal of this competition is to throw an egg as far as possible without it cracking or breaking. Describe your strategy of catching eggs that have been thrown a long distance without breaking in terms of physics. Use terms like impulse and momentum.
The student’s response was:
When trying to poach an egg from the farthest distance, there are several things to keep in mind. Things like the weight of the egg, the distance you toss it, and how you catch the egg can dramatically change the results.
Firstly, when throwing something small like an egg, one must keep in mind that the farther the distance, the stronger the egg is thrown. As more force is applied to the egg, there will be more momentum. This is especially important when catching the egg, as holding it the wrong way can cause it to break.
Catching the egg can be particularly difficult, as the egg is very fragile and fragile. To reduce the momentum, you should hold the egg by its sides so it doesn’t splatter on your hand. The pulsation of the egg, which is its average strength over a period of time, must be reduced to ensure a safe landing of the egg. By grabbing the egg from the sides, you reduce its momentum and impulse to make the egg fall into your palm later.
Totor’s reply was: To win the competition, we need to throw the egg as high as possible. So when it falls, it will also have a high speed. The egg mass is fixed. So, if we want to win this contest, we have to be ready to face the huge momentum that we’re going to get when it goes down. Suppose we take time “t” to hunt this egg. So the force while picking up the egg will be ‘F’ by:
F*t = m(vf-vi)
So F = m(vf-vi)/t
And we’ve already seen that mass m is constant.
Also Vf = 0 because the egg rests last after being caught.
VI is the speed that was there just before catching the egg and we have already seen that, it will be very high if we want to win the competition.
Now, in order to reduce the force, the only thing we can do is keep the contact time of our “t” hands as high as possible.
If we did, we would be able to reduce the force F to such an extent that the egg would not break even though it was quite fragile.
To increase the calling time, we need to catch the egg in the sweeping process. We need to move our hands down so that the relative speed between the hand and the egg decreases. This will effectively increase the time ‘t’ and thus the force F will be reduced.