6 ms·

Wouldn't the absolute best way (assuming you have never seen an egg before and do not know anything about eggs) would be to try and crush one egg in a vice grip

by columbo 14y ago

Wouldn't the absolute best way (assuming you have never seen an egg before and do not know anything about eggs) would be to try and crush one egg in a vice grip to determine the strength of the outer structure and then infer a fuzzy-ish height/speed limit from that?

sigkill 14y ago
Well frankly, as a aero/mech engineer I'd definitely pull out the UTM and the aero chamber. Your vice grip isn't going to be enough. [For those wondering, first the aero chamber to determine Cd and terminal velocity. Then the UTM be used to determine the compressive strength.] After that I'd scan the other egg in a 3D scanner and generate a super accurately detailed model. Once the model is ready, it's just a matter of plugging these values into Ansys explicit dynamics or Comsol multiphysics and find out the exact height at which the egg will break. Granted, you might require a bunch of the world's fastest super computer clusters and a few days to solve this problem, but hey you have a very high accuracy and precision. [Probably +_ 1cm even]. But yeah, since the author has stated it's a math problem we've just left it as a thought experiment.
chris_wot 14y ago
"There are no tricks, gotchas or other devious ruses. Don’t rat-hole with issues related to terminal velocity, potential energy or wind resistance. This is a math puzzle plain and simple." Not within the rules!
- columbo 14y ago
  "There are no tricks, gotchas or other devious ruses. Don’t rat-hole with issues related to terminal velocity, potential energy or wind resistance. This is a math puzzle plain and simple." Not out of the rules either (according to what you just posted). At some point you need to crush an egg. If the rules are implying that you can only do X and we are only looking for solution Y then why are we even talking about this? We may as well have a discussion about trains leaving from Chicago and New York and debate what city they will intersect from on a given day.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    "This is a math puzzle, plain and simple" is the give away.

by columbo 14y ago

sigkill 14y ago

Well frankly, as a aero/mech engineer I'd definitely pull out the UTM and the aero chamber. Your vice grip isn't going to be enough. [For those wondering, first the aero chamber to determine Cd and terminal velocity. Then the UTM be used to determine the compressive strength.] After that I'd scan the other egg in a 3D scanner and generate a super accurately detailed model. Once the model is ready, it's just a matter of plugging these values into Ansys explicit dynamics or Comsol multiphysics and find out the exact height at which the egg will break. Granted, you might require a bunch of the world's fastest super computer clusters and a few days to solve this problem, but hey you have a very high accuracy and precision. [Probably +_ 1cm even]. But yeah, since the author has stated it's a math problem we've just left it as a thought experiment.

chris_wot 14y ago

"There are no tricks, gotchas or other devious ruses. Don’t rat-hole with issues related to terminal velocity, potential energy or wind resistance. This is a math puzzle plain and simple." Not within the rules!

columbo 14y ago
"There are no tricks, gotchas or other devious ruses. Don’t rat-hole with issues related to terminal velocity, potential energy or wind resistance. This is a math puzzle plain and simple." Not out of the rules either (according to what you just posted). At some point you need to crush an egg. If the rules are implying that you can only do X and we are only looking for solution Y then why are we even talking about this? We may as well have a discussion about trains leaving from Chicago and New York and debate what city they will intersect from on a given day.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  "This is a math puzzle, plain and simple" is the give away.