Dear John,

Just thinking about this gives me a headache!

Cheers,

Pat Naughtin CAMS
Geelong, Australia

on 2002-11-20 01.37, John Nichols at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> It is not that the equation is F=ma, but that it is the
> 
> sum of the forces = ma.
> 
> Now it would have had velocity so the damping factor would have come into
> play as it contacted Newton's head.  The displacement from the point of
> impact till it was stopped brings the stiffness into play.
> 
> So assuming that it feel 1 metre  (What else would God pick for such an
> important experiment) and that g is 9.81 in that place on the earth then
> 
> it would have taken the square root of 2/9.81 as the fall time being 0.45
> seconds, give or take a thousands of a second.
> 
> it would have been travelling with a velocity of 4.4 m/s give or take a
> smidgen.
> 
> given a stiffness of the apple of 0.1 GPa and of the human as 1.0 kPa
> ignoring the increasing stiffness as bone comes into play, probably taking
> it up to about 10 GPa, limestone is 40 GPa so I am assuming 0.25 of that.
> 
> The displacement into the head was about 1 mm.  Which means the apple
> actually fell 1.001 so we can repeat the whole thing and find out that in
> reality it penetrated 1.001 mm and so on on so forth. until some one points
> out that it was actually 39.37 inches falling with a velocity of
> 778.5  inches per George with a travel time of 0.1 Georges  ( I have
> allowed one Imperial George to equal 4.5 seconds.  )
> 
> Now I stop because the maths is beyond my University level.
> 
> Of course if there had been a stiff breeze no.....................
> 
> John Nichols
> 
> 
> At 02:27 AM 19-11-2002, you wrote:
>> At 8:57 +1100 02/11/19, Pat Naughtin wrote:
>>> As a side issue, you might like to compare this last average with the apple
>>> that is supposed to have fallen on Sir Isaac Newton's head in his garden at
>>> Woolsthorpe. Presumably Newton's apple had a weight of one newton, and we
>>> can safely assume that the acceleration due to gravity was about the same as
>>> now (say 9.8 m/s^2). Using the formula F = ma, it follows that the mass of
>>> Newton's apple was m = F/m = 1 � 9.8 = 102 grams. It follows that Isaac
>>> Newton's original apple (allowing certain assumptions) was quite small.
>> 
>> Indeed we were quite lucky: imangine that the famous apple was huge, say
>> 500 g, Isaac Newton could well have been knocked out...
>> 
>> Louis
> 
> John Nichols  BE, Ph.D. (Newcastle), MIE (Aust), Chartered Professional
> Engineer
> Assistant Professor
> Texas A&M University
> Department of Construction Science
> Langford AC
> Rm: A414   MD 3137
> College Station, TX 77843-3137
> 
> Electronic mail:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Telephone:         979 845 6541
> Facsimile:          979 862 1572
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> a fronte praecipitium  a tergo lupi
> 
> in front a precipice, behind a wolf
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> 

Reply via email to