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Blog post: swansont: More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Dominos

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97rBdSYbkg]

 

A domino can knock over another domino about 50% larger than itself. A chain of dominos of increasing size makes a kind of mechanical chain reaction that starts with a tiny push and knocks down an impressively large domino.

 

Original idea by Lorne Whitehead, American Journal of Physics, Vol. 51, page 182 (1983).

 

See
for a sophisticated discussion of the physics.

 

One thing not discussed in the video (but the paper treats in gory detail) is that it's not just an energy argument — you also must consider the collision between the dominos. It should be pretty obvious that the dominos can't be separated by more than their height, else they won't collide, but that they also need to hit the next high enough in order to exert a sufficient torque to topple it. Which contributes to this limit on the size of the next one. Read and comment on the full post

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