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Stone Skipping the Scientific Way
Quirk writes "National Geographic has a bit on the scientific analysis of stone skipping. Using a machine launching aluminum disks Lyderic Bocquet, a physics professor at the University of Lyon, and his colleagues discovered the 'magic angle' of 20 degrees as that required to maximize skipping. 'Jerdone Coleman McGhee of Wimberley, Texas, holds the current Guinness Book of World Records title for a 1992 toss that yielded an impressive 38 bounces across the Blanco River in central Texas'"
What we should REALLY be trying to figure out is how to skip more massive stones. That's the next step.
This one time, me and some people were skipping stones *hardcore* style. We got the biggest flat rocks we could lift and tried to spin them. Usually they just glided, but sometimes they would skip fairly high.
Of course, once the government got hold of this technology, they would put it to use bombing Iraq.
Esoteric reference.
I hear it's a lot easier after the lake freezes over.
that a human can skip one 38 times, but there is no mention on how many times the machine they built was able to do it. Just watch, this is gonna lead to some wacky robotics competition where teams try to construct different robotic launchers to see which can skip more times or longer distance.
"0101100101? It's just jibberish. *looks in mirror, gasps* 1010011010@!? AHHHHHH!!"
...geeks bringing a stone skipping machine to tweak and experiment with while they go camping with their Wi-Fi gear. Can't we have a normal camping trip? =)
The article suggests that this is the first time this type of problem has been scientifically studied. As far as I know this kind of problem has been very thoroughly studied for aerospace purposes: a planet's atmosphere is the pond, and a spacecraft is the stone. A google search for 'skip trajectory' shows up lots of serious research.
Warning: not for the faint-hearted!
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
the allies figured this out in ww2. Nazi dam bombing
The massive spinning bombs that were designed to bounce along the water before sinking and exploding in front of a dam? That technology was developed and used successfully in world war II by the english.
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
I recall watching a documentary about Barnes Wallis, a British scientist who during WWII invented and "perfected" a dam busting bomb. A rather large (multi ton) spinning cylinder full of explosives that would be dropped from a plane at remarkably low altitude over water directly at a dam at high speed, resulting in the bomb's skipping, like a stone, until it would collide with the dam. The bomb would then sink, but it's spinning motion would keep it tight to the dam until it exploded.
Wallis' research involved countless stone skipping tests, that inevitably resulted in the discovery of the perfect angle.
The bombs themselves enjoyed marginal success, succesfully destroying 1 of 3 objectives, if I'm not mistaken.
http://simscience.org/cracks/dambusters.html - Interesting videos and more information.