What is this disturbing obsession thehoi polloi have with dropping things off tall buildings?
First pennies in Cecil’s column, then mice.
I blame it on the Bossa Nova. 
Blame Galileo. He wasn’t trying to prove anything about gravity when dropping all those metal balls. He was just out of interesting stuff to throw. It was actually an experiment involving a Priest’s calico that led to Galileo’s excommunication.
Only if the Empire State Building existed in a vacuum. The air resistence met by the mouse on the way down would slow the acceleration until the force of gravity is equal to the force of the air resistence, and from then on the mouse would fall at a constant (terminal) velocity.
I have no idea how to calculate the terminal velocity of a mouse, though.
I’m doing something wrong. I plugged the numbers in for a 20g mouse ([url=http://www.informatics.jax.org/mgihome/other/mouse_facts3.shtml]) and came back with 556.81 m/s! That’s like, rifle bullet velocity. Now that’s one fast mouse!
Howzabout a 20g mouse whose bottom surface is approximated by an ellipse that’s 1x2 in (2.5 x 5 cm)? I can’t remember the formula for the surface area of an ellipse…
-Ben
This mouse has a density of right around 3 g/cm[sup]3[/sup].
There is no way that that is correct. My guess would be that a mouse has a density around .75 g/cm[sup]3[/sup].
The mouse would be ok if it landed on a…
…mouse pad.
[sub]sorry[/sub]
From The University of Chicago Magazine:
And from a discussion here:
I’ve given up on finding a source for the density of a ouse.
Why not make it more than an assumption? We have already decided it’s OK to throw them in the air to watch their twirling tails, then hurl them full force at a brick wall; it seems only logical that we proceed by compressing them into spheres.
Surely the question is silly because it depends if the mouse lands on it’s head or it’s arse. Also, because it’s small doesnt mean it’s terminal velocity will be less.
Actually, yes it does, if other things such as the density and shape of the mouse and the way it falls are held constant - smaller objects of similar shape and density present more surface area in relation to their mass or volume.
Consider a cube 1 foot on the side - 6 sq ft surface area, 1 cubic foot volume. 2 feet on the side, 24 sq feet surface area, 8 cubic feet volume - the surface area to volume ratio has gone down from 6/1 to 3/1. If the cube is of a uniform substance, ratio of surface area to weight will be affected similarly. Similar decreases in ratio will hold for any 3d shape as the size is increased.
IIRC, when I used to be a grad assistant teaching introductory math courses, we had a “math for the biological sciences” course that used a companion text which asserted this factoid. I believe it said the Eiffel Tower, not the Empire State Building, though. After poking around a bit, I find that the text in question was apparently “Mathematics for the Biological Sciences” by Batschelet, long since out of print, and probably outdated in its motivating examples. This particular example aside, it was noteworthy that the text had a section on various ramifications of the “cube / square” law and its relatives. A worthwile thing to try to get people to remember.
although your conclusion may be right, there are a couple of questionable points:
Squirrels spend most of their time in the tops of trees, mice don’t; thus one might reasonably expect squirrels to be better adapted to survive a considerable fall than mice (maybe stronger leg bones etc) and although a squirrel’s body is larger, they have an enormous fluffy tail and flaps of stretchy skin that that they can extend by spreading out their legs; the whole ensemble forms quite an effective parachute, having a marked effect on terminal velocity - a mouse has no such adaptations.
I saw this film in Junior High School. " Galileo Meets Calicola ".
It had quite an impact.
—pan--
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