10.25.10 - 1:30PM
- by
Will Zweigart

We Showed 'Troll Physics' Comics to a Physics Professor. Here's His Reaction.

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Troll Psychics Is it possible to "troll" the very laws of matter and motion that govern the universe for your own kinetic benefit? For example, can one survive a falling elevator by jumping up in the air at the last minute? Also, f*cking electromagnetism - how does it work?

If you've pondered any of those questions before, the blog Troll Physics offers incredibly simple but impossible "hacks" for manipulating the laws of nature to yield infinite energy, money and/or sexual partners. Since this site is pretty much a physics teacher's worst nightmare, I cornered one to get his reaction. David Morgan, a natural science professor with a PhD in physics, was kind enough to bring some logic and rational discourse to this hilariously asinine pile of hot meme trash. Read on for a play-by-play scientific smackdown.

DM: "Up" is not "North"...the only reasonable meaning for the word "up" is "in the opposite direction of the Earth's gravitational pull at the surface." So saying "holding the Earth up" doesn't even make any sense. I'm pretty sure I just got a little stupider while explaining that.

troll physics

DM: Jumping off the ground - or even a chair on the ground - is nothing like jumping off a chair while you and the chair are in freefall. Because the chair isn't connected to anything, you'll be pushing the chair DOWN as much as pushing yourself up (via Newton's third law). And since you have much more mass than the chair, the force you and the chair exert on one another will speed up the chair's descent much more than it slows your own.

troll physics

DM: If all the plants on the planet can't currently absorb the human-generated CO2 where they are, moving some of them closer to the cars certainly isn't going to help. Stupid.

troll physics

DM: One look at the bottoms of the two wheels is enough to see that this doesn't amount to "downhill" in any way whatsoever.

troll physics

DM: You don't really need a guy with a PhD to explain to you that bacon isn't a plant, right?

troll physics

DM: This actually makes an interesting point, sort of. Why don't you recoil when you shine a beam of light? The answer is -You actually do! But not at the same SPEED as the light - with the same MOMENTUM as the light. The momentum (p) of a single photon of light is equal its energy divided by the speed of light (E = c p). So how much momentum does a beam of light carry? Well, suppose we shine a 100 Watt spotlight - we are producing 100 Joules of light energy per second (a Watt is a Joule of energy per second). So every second we are giving that light a momentum of (100J) / (300,000,000m/s) = .00000033 kg m/s.

To give a sense of how hard of a push that is, let's assume that the stupid troll thing in the wagon weighs 50 kg. To accelerate the wagon up to a speed of 1 m/s (around 3 feet per second... which is still pretty slow) would take (33 million * 50) seconds, which is 52 years. And that's assuming no friction!

(In reality, it would never move at all because of friction, so we'd have to do it in space. In fact, even though this seems like a feeble form of propulsion, NASA has plans for prototypes of a "solar sail" to push space probes out of the solar system using no propulsion other than that provided by reflected sunlight!)

We'd like to thank Dr. David Morgan for playing along with us, and we assure readers that he very much "gets" the joke. He is probably still shaking his head at this stuff, though.

link:// Troll Physics Blog
link:// Know Your Meme: Troll Physics
previously:// Trolling Hipster and Hysterical Ex Have Epic Phone Fight
previously:// What Happens When Trolls Troll Trolls?

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10.26.10

By Mark

Highest Rank

Haha! Thanks for this post. Disappointed on the bacon tree though.

10.26.10

By sara

Neutral

the explanation about the plant is very vague and not accurate. But I guess it's because he's a physicist and not a biologist.

And he should have used inelastic collisions to explain the chair case.

The speed of light comic was the best one indeed

10.26.10

By DudeAbides

Highest Rank

I was treated to a quickie rundown of general relativity from Dr. Morgan in class I took at good 'ol EU- very engaging and cool dude.

10.26.10

By binary-zero

Neutral

The professor is most def. jelly !

10.26.10

By Tony

Neutral

This guy really doesn't understand the basic principles of DNFT

10.26.10

By Yeoman Roman

Highest Rank

Sez You!

Well it is all pretty civil in here compared to the usual internet bloodbath! I know the good professor personally and can attest that he has a wonderful sense of humor and a real appreciation for the absurd. And his "lifeskills set" is a $100 Swiss Army knife, while the rest of us have our Barlows, or a flake of flint! A better person I have never known.

Nice to see ya DM, say "Hi" to the family!

10.26.10

By Jeffrey Fisher

Highest Rank

Even if the chair was 100 times heavier than you, the jumping out of a building with a chair would not work. Why?

10.27.10

By Dave M

Highest Rank

I actually gave the full explanation of the char thing, but they edited it down for size, leaving out the most important part... However high you can jump, the speed that you leave the ground on the way up is the same as the speed you hit the ground when you come back down. (Conservation of energy demands this, if nothing else.) This means that you'll only be able to generate enough vertical speed to offset a 10 story fall if you can normally jump 10 stories. If you can normally only jump 2 feet, then the most you could hope to do is knock the effect of two feet of freefall speed off your fall.

10.28.10

By Sylocat

Neutral

You know, the first one raises an interesting sociological point as well: It's only convention that dictates which end of a compass is designated "North." It's only convention that dictates which side of a map faces up.

10.27.10

By The Lerpa

Neutral

So, if the falling chair one doesn't work because the chair's mass is so small, would the same trick work if you were standing on a falling 70-ton boulder?

10.28.10

By Kamal Tripathi

Highest Rank

Well it will not. There is no external force to reduce your speed to zero (or to a comfortable level, your body can bear). All that matters is how hard can you hit the chair/object. That is the only force that can slow you down. Clearly if you were to hit while you both are stationary on ground, it wouldn't budge (or it wouldn't fly off) so you wouldn't drastically reduce your speed.

Best chances are to stretch your arms and try to float in air, just like cats do :)

10.27.10

By Riley

Neutral

Does Troll Physics come from Caltech, the place where students are Trolls and are known for their sense of humor ?

10.27.10

By Ashley

Highest Rank

HEY! YOU TRICKED ME INTO LEARNING SOMETHING ASSHOLE!

10.27.10

By Alexander Tanasie

Neutral

Trolling the troll, I see. :P

10.28.10

By Kamal Tripathi

Neutral

ha ha .. that was funny. Without patting my own back, I could explain couple of the trolls myself. While graduating once I did think abt the "lift problem" .. lol.

Here is another thing. You are in those spacious city volvo bus, it is abt to collide against another bus, you have enough time to respond acrobatically or like Neo from The Matrix. The other bus hits your volvo across at the front, right at the driver position. You run to the center and jump high, bus will go into rotational motion, but you won't, you will land safely on the ground.

P.S. I myself know what is wrong "in practice" with this problem, but then we are talking abt trolls aren't we:)

10.28.10

By Alexis H

Neutral

Yep. The only way that would work is if the bus spun in place, you jumped before the bus began spinning, and you were able to keep in the air until the bus stopped spinning. If the bus moves, you hit a wall and get smacked around in the spin. If you did not jump before the spin, you will still spin negating the safety. If you hit the ground of the bus before it stops spinning, you will hit the ground, and it will force you into the spin as well due to the friction. Do we have any more problems with it?