The Cork
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The Cork
Imagine a cork held by a clamp attachment at the bottom of a bucket of water. If the clamp is designed to release the cork at the same instant the bucket is dropped off the side of a sky scrapper, what will happen to the cork during the fall? Will it float to the top of the bucket normally, slower than normal, faster than normal, or not at all?
Assume that there is no air resistance to slow the bucket down.
Assume that there is no air resistance to slow the bucket down.
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The cork and the bucket will fall at the same speed. So acceleration due to gravity is negated to a point of reference inside the bucket. The cork is displacing water and has bouyancy. Therefore the cork will rise to the top of the water and float at a normal position as if the system was at rest. The speed of floating to the top would be the same as if the bucket were sitting still. Once the cork is at the top of the water, it will continue to fall with the bucket. This is assuming that the water and bucket both accelerate at the same time and rate.
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Yeah mistercmk...I agree. What's with all the physics questions? My old brain ran out of rom and ram memory a long time ago.
As for the question.....the bucket will hit a policeman standing on the sidewalk at bottom of said skyscraper and the person that dropped it will have time to figure out the answer while in jail. LOL!
As for the question.....the bucket will hit a policeman standing on the sidewalk at bottom of said skyscraper and the person that dropped it will have time to figure out the answer while in jail. LOL!
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When the bucket is dropped, it will fall straight down and leave the cork sitting there in mid-air. The cork will then look down and do a double-take (making a funny sound), then the cork will begin to fall. When the bucket hits the ground all the water will get splashed out and when the cork lands in the bucket, it will get flattened out like pancake and get an imprint of something like "Acme" on it's face. Now what do I win? (That was for mistercmk, see physics can be funny)
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Faster than normal, since the cork now has the acceleration of the falling bucket to speed it up. It pops out of the bucket, jumps onto the ledge, and watches the falling bucket from it's new vantage point.
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i ain't rite
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From: Marlboro Mental Hospital.
none of the above.
half way down, the bucket is gonna realize that the impact at the bottom of the fall is gonna hurt, and reverses direction back to the roof.
the water, no longer having a bucket to protect it, is going to evaporate before it hits the ground.
and the cork, it aint goin no where, because the clamping device was assembled improperly by unskilled labor, causing it to malfunction, so it was never released in the first place.
half way down, the bucket is gonna realize that the impact at the bottom of the fall is gonna hurt, and reverses direction back to the roof.
the water, no longer having a bucket to protect it, is going to evaporate before it hits the ground.
and the cork, it aint goin no where, because the clamping device was assembled improperly by unskilled labor, causing it to malfunction, so it was never released in the first place.
Last edited by tjc transport; Dec 12, 2005 at 02:56 PM.
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Stab #2. The cork, the bucket and the water are all acted on by the same force (gravity). So all three start to accelerate at the same rate. Since the cork it bouyant, it has an additional force acting on it in the opposite direction, so it will accelerate slower than the rest of the system, referenced to a point outside the bucket. If you were observing from inside the bucket the cork would appear to rise at the normal rate. From a point outside the bucket it would appear to fall at a slower rate. (Maybe even rise, don't know the acceleration due to bouyancy vs gravity.) When the cork has reached the top of the water, it will be falling at a slower rate than the rest of the system (bucket and water) so it will appear to rise above the water. At this point the only force acting on the cork is gravity so it will accelerate toward the ground. It will accelerate at the same rate as the buket and water but the bucket and water has a head start so the cork will not catch up until the bucket hits the ground. Infact, with no wind resistance the bucket/water will continue to accellerate and the distance between the water and cork will increase because the bucket/water will always be travelling faster than the cork.