Troll Physics

Special Friday Edition. Source: http://www.urlesque.com/2010/10/25/i-showed-troll-physics-comics-to-a-physics-professor/

We Showed 'Troll Physics' Comics to a Physics Professor. Here's His Reaction.



Is it possible to "troll" the very laws of matter and motion that govern the universe for your own kinetic benefit? For example, can one survive a falling elevator by jumping up in the air at the last minute? Also, f*cking electromagnetism - how does it work?

If you've pondered any of those questions before, the blog Troll Physics offers incredibly simple but impossible "hacks" for manipulating the laws of nature to yield infinite energy, money and/or sexual partners. Since this site is pretty much a physics teacher's worst nightmare, I cornered one to get his reaction. David Morgan, a natural science professor with a PhD in physics, was kind enough to bring some logic and rational discourse to this hilariously asinine pile of hot meme trash. Read on for a play-by-play scientific smackdown.



DM: "Up" is not "North"...the only reasonable meaning for the word "up" is "in the opposite direction of the Earth's gravitational pull at the surface." So saying "holding the Earth up" doesn't even make any sense. I'm pretty sure I just got a little stupider while explaining that.



DM: Jumping off the ground - or even a chair on the ground - is nothing like jumping off a chair while you and the chair are in freefall. Because the chair isn't connected to anything, you'll be pushing the chair DOWN as much as pushing yourself up (via Newton's third law). And since you have much more mass than the chair, the force you and the chair exert on one another will speed up the chair's descent much more than it slows your own.



DM: If all the plants on the planet can't currently absorb the human-generated CO2 where they are, moving some of them closer to the cars certainly isn't going to help. Stupid.



DM: One look at the bottoms of the two wheels is enough to see that this doesn't amount to "downhill" in any way whatsoever.



DM: You don't really need a guy with a PhD to explain to you that bacon isn't a plant, right?



DM: This actually makes an interesting point, sort of. Why don't you recoil when you shine a beam of light? The answer is -You actually do! But not at the same SPEED as the light - with the same MOMENTUM as the light. The momentum (p) of a single photon of light is equal its energy divided by the speed of light (E = c p). So how much momentum does a beam of light carry? Well, suppose we shine a 100 Watt spotlight - we are producing 100 Joules of light energy per second (a Watt is a Joule of energy per second). So every second we are giving that light a momentum of (100J) / (300,000,000m/s) = .00000033 kg m/s.

To give a sense of how hard of a push that is, let's assume that the stupid troll thing in the wagon weighs 50 kg. To accelerate the wagon up to a speed of 1 m/s (around 3 feet per second... which is still pretty slow) would take (33 million * 50) seconds, which is 52 years. And that's assuming no friction!

(In reality, it would never move at all because of friction, so we'd have to do it in space. In fact, even though this seems like a feeble form of propulsion, NASA has plans for prototypes of a "solar sail" to push space probes out of the solar system using no propulsion other than that provided by reflected sunlight!)


We'd like to thank Dr. David Morgan for playing along with us, and we assure readers that he very much "gets" the joke. He is probably still shaking his head at this stuff, though.

LOL

i didnt get half of them, but the doctors responses made me Lol ALOT

Man Heath, you do a good job at this xD. Nice going

I want that physics doc to explain the ones Heath posted up. While clearly impossible, I wonder what he'd have to say about it.

So today was Yale app/leave home so kids would stop bothering me day. I promise I'll post extra tomorrow

lol, awesome, thanks.

Awesome physics. They tested the chair one on mythbusters cept it was an elevator.

Heath wrote:

That is FREAKING HILARIOUS lmao!

i thought teh chair one would work tbh :/

and lol at the new one

lol, why doesn't the chair / elevator one work again? Does the amount of downward momentum outweigh that of the person jumping upward?

ftwinz wrote:lol, why doesn't the chair / elevator one work again? Does the amount of downward momentum outweigh that of the person jumping upward?

The reason it doesn't work is that the timing that you would have to pull off is just to insane for a normal human being. That and most of the times the free fall variable to which you will die is just to much for you to counter its massive death force.

The reason the chair one doesn't work is because of:

DM: Jumping off the ground - or even a chair on the ground - is nothing like jumping off a chair while you and the chair are in freefall. Because the chair isn't connected to anything, you'll be pushing the chair DOWN as much as pushing yourself up (via Newton's third law). And since you have much more mass than the chair, the force you and the chair exert on one another will speed up the chair's descent much more than it slows your own.

Khana wrote:The reason the chair one doesn't work is because of:

DM: Jumping off the ground - or even a chair on the ground - is nothing like jumping off a chair while you and the chair are in freefall. Because the chair isn't connected to anything, you'll be pushing the chair DOWN as much as pushing yourself up (via Newton's third law). And since you have much more mass than the chair, the force you and the chair exert on one another will speed up the chair's descent much more than it slows your own.

That's basically what I said if you want it in scientific mumbo jumbo.

Mythbusters did prove that it could be done if the timing is right, however to do so would require much more force than the average person can produce to counter the variable of freefall in terms of jumping of the chair to counter said force.

Actually, what you said sounded a lot more scientific--the professor stated it more in layman's physics terms.

lol I kinda lost myself in what I said to the point it doesn't make to sense.

wow. just wow.

Lol Heath, your gonna kill me with these one day. Make more of these xD

LOL I don't think that's going to work......

Lol Dai, I don't make these. I just post what I find.

lol; I wish I could do some of those things like the shoes one... or the chair one. I would... go jumping off buildings if you could. 8D