If I were to hypothetically toss a pumpkin off the roof of a 50 story building, would it kill or seriously hurt anyone it fell on? My wife seems to think it would, but I think it would squish up and break apart enough upon impact to make a hell of a mess, but not leave any serious injury. Has a falling pumpkin ever killed anyone? Has anyone survived a pumpkin falling from a significant height?
Well, F=ma regardless of the squishiness of the falling object. A fifty pound pumpkin impacting your head after a fifty story fall is going to create a whole lot of F on top of your cranium, and it’s going to do it in a compact area. Fifty pounds of feathers would probably just kind of drown you but a pumpkin? Yeah, it’d bust your head and spine up real good.
ETA: Also, pumpkins aren’t all that squashy–apples are just as squashy and they can bust your nose just fine if thrown with a good arm. Some pumpkins have very thick walls with not a lot of space in the middle, and can be considered solid objects for all reasonable calculations.
If it had enough velocity of course. Depends on how high it was dropped.
I think the equation is more complex than the mass times acceleration that you implied. If 50 pounds of water fell on you, would it kill you? A one pound water balloon hitting your head at terminal velocity wouldn’t do nearly as much damage as a one pound baseball, right?
I’m gonna’ say that a Pumpkin-stomping expedition is substantially more fun than an apple-stomping excursion.
Can I get a cite for your assertion?
At Delaware’s annual Punkin Chunkin festival, I’ve seen pumpkins hit soft-packed soil after a half-mile flight… they are more or less vaporized. The millimeter-thick waxy skin is left in dime-sized fragments, but the rind is reduced to pulp and scattered for yards in every direction. Think about how much force you’d have to apply to a pumpkin with a hammer to get that to happen in a single blow - that’s how much force your head would be imparting on the pumpkin (and vice versa).
Pumpkins are a hard solid. The victim of the prank will be dead.
As God is my witness, I thought pumpkins could fly.
You’re kidding, right? Go knock on some fresh pumpkins (not ones that have been carved out and let to sit for a week–of course those are soft; they’re half rotten!) and tell me they’re not hard.
If we accept that a good-sized pumpkin has about the size and density of a small adult, we can estimate a terminal velocity of around 100mph. It wouldn’t quite reach that falling 50 stories building, so let’s estimate 80mph.
I’m not sure how to calculate the injury likely from a 100-lb object traveling 80mph, but it would surely be non-trivial. I think it could plausibly be fatal.
Sure would, assuming it was in one piece and not in a rainstorm.
Wrong. Water is famously noncompressible. Even if the balloon deformed upon impact, you still have a very hard pound of stuff hitting you at 162 mph. That’ll do a whole lot of damage.
Water is incompressible, but it’s also not rigid. Assuming the balloon breaks at the moment of impact (not unreasonable, IMO), the force of the water’s impact would be spread over as much area as possible. The damage done would be much less than that of the same amount of water frozen into a rigid ball of ice.
Having been hit by both thrown baseballs and water balloons on occasion, I have to say that the baseballs hurt a lot more. Granted, that was only at thrown speeds, but I’d have to imagine that a dropped baseball would also hurt more than a dropped water balloon.
The relevant quantity here is energy. When a falling object hits your head, it’s got a certain amount of kinetic energy, but not all of that energy goes into your head. For a water balloon (or, to a lesser extent, a pumpkin), a lot of that energy goes into the splash. For a baseball, though, much less of the energy goes into the ball, leaving more to be absorbed by your noggin.
I dropped a pumpkin on my toe once.
It hurt.
I expect it would have hurt more if I had dropped it 50 stories, rather than two feet.
Chronos and Sublight, we will now get into one of the famous SDMB nitpicking arguments over whether the postulated balloon did actually break when encountering said postulated head or whether the assumption is that the balloon would be a solid object like a baseball. Or whether a pound of water in a balloon is the same weight as a pound of feathers in a balloon, and whether they would achieve the same terminal velocity.
Or whether Mosier is trying, desperately, to come up with some way, any way, to crawl out of having to acknowledge that his wife was right.
Methinks it’s the latter.
Suck it up and grovel, man. It’ll do ya good.
No. Ever had a wave crash on you? There’s a lot of power there, but 50 pounds is only about six and a half gallons. If it’s in a rigid container it’d mess you up, but it would hardly register if it were poured out of a bucket, for example.
I’ve got a baseball in one hand, and a water balloon in the other. Which would you rather me throw at you?
I can’t remember the last time I did an impact analysis with a check box of “solid” or “not solid”.
ETA: But, yes, a falling pumpkin could easily kill somebody.
What he said. Fresh punkins - or even not so fresh ones that are still whole - are hard. Unless you’re volunteering to be the one at the bottom of the building, that is. 
My advice is - don’t volunteer. You’ll take a lot of regrets with you into the afterlife. You won’t choke on “I was wrong”; I promise. I’ve had to say it before. No, of course it’s not fun, but it’s character building. And if you’re smart enough to follow the admission with, “Honey, I’m glad I married such a smart woman,” I’ll bet it will get you brownie points like you won’t believe. We women are suckers for a good compliment.
Mind you, I never said that a pumpkin wouldn’t kill. It’s quite plausible that it would, and I have no intention of performing the experiment. All I said is that a pumpkin would do less damage than an object which wouldn’t splatter. But “less damage” might still be “enough damage”.
Okay, so I’ve decided to call off the practical portion of this experiment. I’m sure whatever unlucky sod would have happened to be at the bottom of said 50 story building would thank you all, if he only knew the peril he has just avoided.