What would happen if someone dropped a basketball off the top of the Empire State Building? Would it bounce or pop?
I would think it would bounce personaly, because you can see people dribble the ball faster then what terminal velocity would be and it stays intact.
First of all, just dropping it won’t get it to the bottom. You have to throw that sucker fairly hard.
I think it would reach it’s terminal velocity. I don’t know if that is enough to pop it. If it bounced, it would be a hell of bounce. (Probably the theoretical maximum, what with terminal velocity and all.)
Tris
I don’t get this. Have I been whooshed? Or are you saying with air currents and the such that it would be hard to miss another building on the way to the street?
Yes because of the winds and currents it would hit and get stuck somewhere on the buidling. Mythbusters did a test with a penny and they penny would never reach the bottom
Have you seen the Empire State Building? From the Observation Deck, you have to get it a good thirty or forty feet out in order to clear the shoulder of the building below you.
The Empire State Building has multiple setbacks. Dropping anything from the top will cause it to land on the 86th floor terrace or the one below that if you’re lucky.
No, he’s saying the observation deck on the ESB does not fill the complete footprint of the building. Because the building “tapers” as it it goes up, the ball will hit the roof of another floor only a few floors below. You need to throw it to get it past the buildings foot print to get it to land on the sidewalk/street.
The Empire State Building is tiered, with higher levels set back further from the street, IIRC so as not to block out too much light at street level.
Edit: OK, well several people beat me to it, so I will add that the terminal velocity of a basketball is apparently only about 48mph (if this page (see bottom) is correct)).
No, you guys are all wrong. You have to throw it really hard because it’s such a long way to the bottom. I’ll bet most people couldn’t manage it. Do you have any idea how tall that thing is? It’s freaking ginormous! Twelve hundred and fifty feet of Deco Love, is what we used to call it back in college. Nobody can throw a basketball that far, really, but I guess it’s kind of fun as a thought experiment.
I think if you did manage it, the basketball would hit the ground so hard it would set off a chain reaction that would burn away the atmosphere of the Earth. Best not to try.
My edit time limit has expired, so I’ll add that if that 48mph figure is correct, then there’s no way the ball would pop, or even bounce particularly high. That speed is about on a par with a soccer free kick, for instance (cite), and soccer balls don’t burst when Beckham shoots against the crossbar.
Wait a minute - have you guys ever considered the fact that the ESB is tiered?
I’m just asking …
:smack:
(Actually, I was thinking that the ESB had more significant setbacks along one axis than the other, but it has been a while since I’ve seen it in person (or even looked at a picture closely) and decades since I’ve spit off the observation deck. Also, I guess I was interpreting the OP as asking if a b-ball were tossed from the height of the ESB, rather than inquiring about actually going up there and giving it a try.)
This person is correct… I want to know what would happen if a bball were tossed from the height of the ESB.
In case anyone is tempted to explore the linked site, be warned that it’s total rubbish.
I just did a real quick back-of-the-napkin calculation, and I got a terminal speed of around 56 mph for a basketball. There’s some slop in there, but my number is in the same ballpark as the one Colophon links to. I plugged in numbers and balanced drag and gravity, using typical basketball dimensions.
I used a drag coefficient of 0.4, which is what I found for a rough sphere at a Reynolds number of 10[sup]6[/sup]; a smooth sphere at that value of Re is listed at 0.1. 56 mph in air corresponds to a Reynolds number of about 200,000 - nearly an order of magnitude lower than that for which I looked up C[sub]D[/sub]. My point is, this is not meant to be an exact figure, by any means - kinda close, at best.
A basketball is pretty big, and really not that heavy; you would not expect it to have a terminal speed as high as a human, for example. Think what a basketball weighs compared to a basketball-sized volume of water. It would not be healthy to get whacked on the head by this falling orb, but the ball’s not going to crater the sidewalk or anything like that.
So how high would it bounce, assuming we’re doing this in the desert, on smooth rock, from a helicopter at the height of the Empire State Building (so it bounces more or less up, not ricocheting off anything.) My eyeball estimate of the bouncing soccer ball with the kids seems to show about 1/3 to 1/2 bounce back (depending on how well inflated the soccer ball is) with short distance bounces. Does that sort of ratio still hold for this huge sort of height, or is the bounce height based on the speed when it hits the ground?
I have the sinking feeling I once knew how to figure this out, but pretty much all the maths I ever learned leaked out of my brain just after Finals.
Wait. You couldn’t just drop a basketball from the empire state building: it’s tiered.
A piece of it may make it to the ground despite the tiered building. Just ask this guy: http://1010wins.com/pages/355017.php?contentType=4&contentId=412351
The real problem is that it has to go through an infinite number of steps, each one half the distance of the last. No matter how many steps it takes it still has an infinite number of steps to go, so no matter how close it gets to the ground, it never quite touches it. This is what keeps the ball from exploding like the Hindenberg, and is coincidentally also the principle by which bumblebees fly.
This concludes today’s Science Misinformation Moment.
Stranger