Why would'nt this work?
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Reminds me of
- If you can have dinner with anyone, alive or dead, who would it be?
- No thanks, I've already eaten.
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It was Alpha Phoenix
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Objects like an unbreakable stick are still composed of atoms suspended in space and held together by the fundamental forces of nature. When you push on one end, the other end doesn't immediately move with it but rather the object experiences a wave of compression traveling through it. This wave of compression travels faster than we can perceive but still cannot travel faster than light.
Look up why arrows bend after they've been released by a bow, it's essentially the same mechanic.
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Because you put the apostrophe in the wrong place?
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It's still called the speed of sound. Your intuition is correct in that it's much higher for solid things, but it's still much slower than the speed of light.
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Move a sheet up and down rapidly
You can see the wave travel across it
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Everything soft and slow like your brain yes.
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Your push would travel at the speed of sound in the stick. You could think of hitting a pipe with a hammer, the sound of the hit would travel at the speed of sound, same is true for you pushing the stick.
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Well, it made me feel smart. So either you're a good teacher, and helped me put into words and solidify something I already understood more abstractly. Or you're a terrible teacher, and have led me further astray.
Pretty rough dichotomy there. I would not want to be an educator.
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The punching-through should start at the point of impact, since that end of the pole and that spot on the wall pole both know about the collision at that moment, and then the information travels back through the pole. So I think the front end of the pole would start breaking through the wall immediately, while the information about the impact is still traveling back through the pole. For that reason I think the front end of the pole might end up sticking farther out of the barn than the back end, because it has more time to so it. Would be interesting math, which I've never tried to figure out.
There can't be infinite deceleration, for the same reason that the back end of the pole can't instantly know the front end has run into the wall. Deceleration travels back through the length of the pole as its atoms squish up against the atoms in front of them and slow down.
Interesting for sure!
