Hacker News Reader

Comment by plasma_beam | Hacker News Reader

In high school physics I procrastinated until the night before our egg drop competition to finally address what I was going to do. I got a medium/large size plastic tupperware container (rigid plastic body with a rigid lid). I took a bag of cotton balls, stuffed them in there as tight as I could, put an empty cardboard toilet paper roll vertically in the center, with more cotton balls designed to go in said cardboard below and above the egg. Taped the lid shut. People laughed at my concoction, especially those that went to great efforts to design theirs. I even tossed mine in the air beforehand to test it, which gave me extreme confidence going into the 30 ft drop that I'd be fine. I was. I do not recall what side it landed on but obviously it bounced several hard times after hitting the ground.

View on HN

i've done this experiment 2 years in a row with my youngest kiddo as a STEM challenge in elementary school. i thought we got pretty close this year with using heavy duty sponges, paper plates, and a parachute, but was always operating under the assumption that the egg needs to be vertical. i'm excited to try again next year after reading this.

oh and at our school, they bring in a big bucket truck from the local power company and send the teachers up to the top with the devices and let them drop them :)

Get a block of styrofoam, slice it in two, and carve out a hole between the blocks exactly the size and shape of your egg. Tape the blocks together with the egg in the centre.

It is incredibly effective to have a solid surface in contact with the whole shell. And, the outer styrofoam will absorb the worst of the landing. It's also very light, so it minimizes the energy that must be dissipated.

Lesson learned from my failed attempt at the egg drop in high school. The guy with the styrofoam absolutely destroyed everyone at that challenge.

Even simpler: A barrel of water densified such that the egg floats in the middle

That was the solution employed in the ActionLabs video linked in another comment, but you'll note that their first attempt failed with that approach.

It's difficult to prevent any container that heavy from breaking open when hitting concrete at terminal velocity. I'd bet that the styrofoam block could be dropped from any height and survive landing on any surface, no matter how unyielding.

How about soaking the egg into epoxy resin ?

That cracks me up!

Even if the egg doesn’t survive, nobody will ever know!

The one time I did it in highschool I suspended the egg in a small cloth bag within a box. No padding just the secure cloth bag attached to the inside corners of the box with taut twine. Egg survived the 3 story drop easily, even was fine when we kicked it around afterwards.

Yeah, I carefully followed the rules on that competition and made a cage that had the egg suspended with rubber bands. Worked pretty well in home testing. Lost to the kids that shoved wadded up paper towels into Tupperware containers.

Never believed in physics again.

Yeah, tight packing is simple and very effective. I had a successful drop with nothing but corn starch packing peanuts shoved into a cardboard box.

I put it in a half filled gallon ziploc of flour (on top of the flour).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com