“It’s a problem that is so natural. Everybody plays with dominoes,” says David Cantor. Cantor is a civil engineer and has decided to study dominoes.
Cantor believes that dominoes are fun game to play with a buddy and similarly, conducting research about the physics of these playing pieces is a fun project to work on with a buddy too. Cantor teamed up with Kajetan Wojtacki, a physicist who works for the Institute of Fundamental Technological Research.
The 2 of them use a computer to model dominoes collapsing. They learned that it was a chain reaction, and the speed depends on friction. The dominoes rub together as they collide, they also slide along the surface on which they sit. The fastest fall occurred when they spaced the slippery dominoes close together on a rough surface. Cantor and Wojtacki were inspired by Destin Sandlin and his YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay. From these videos they learned that slicker dominoes have less friction, and less friction means the dominoes will fall faster.
High friction pieces don’t slide too far which slows the chain reaction down. Some don’t even touch because they have too much backslide and are spaced too far apart. They used math and science to figure this out.
Cantor believes that dominoes are fun game to play with a buddy and similarly, conducting research about the physics of these playing pieces is a fun project to work on with a buddy too. Cantor teamed up with Kajetan Wojtacki, a physicist who works for the Institute of Fundamental Technological Research.
The 2 of them use a computer to model dominoes collapsing. They learned that it was a chain reaction, and the speed depends on friction. The dominoes rub together as they collide, they also slide along the surface on which they sit. The fastest fall occurred when they spaced the slippery dominoes close together on a rough surface. Cantor and Wojtacki were inspired by Destin Sandlin and his YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay. From these videos they learned that slicker dominoes have less friction, and less friction means the dominoes will fall faster.
High friction pieces don’t slide too far which slows the chain reaction down. Some don’t even touch because they have too much backslide and are spaced too far apart. They used math and science to figure this out.
