i am an idiot

I thought the theory was that if the fly hit the screen of the oncoming train it must for an instant be stationary before it goes backward. If the fly is stationary, then the train must also be stationary for a moment. Therefore the fly stops the train. QED.

Ok - I'm getting my coat....
 
so how many flies would it take to actually make a train stop for say 1/100th of a second?
 
cj10jeeper said:
I thought the theory was that if the fly hit the screen of the oncoming train it must for an instant be stationary before it goes backward. If the fly is stationary, then the train must also be stationary for a moment. Therefore the fly stops the train. QED.

Ok - I'm getting my coat....
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Differential calculus? Fly changes direction, train does not :lol:

My question, ' if a z4 is made with less than 6 cylinders in a forest, does it still make a noise'. :poke:

:rofl:
 
I cant answer about the train and the fly, but I can tell you what happens if you crash a Ford Focus into a concrete wall at 120mph

[youtube]6dI5ewOmHPQ[/youtube]
 
Taz x said:
so how many flies would it take to actually make a train stop for say 1/100th of a second?
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First the train doesn't stop at all and neither does the fly!

So the question is not necessarily how many flies, but how fast does the fly have to go to stop the train.

Lets say that our train weighs 20 metric tonnes or 20,000 kg and is traveling at a sedately 5 mph = 2.2m/s thus momentum = mass x velocity = 44,000 kg.m/s.

The fly, a nice big blue bottle, just feasted on some carrion weighs 0.25 g = 0.00025 kg

Thus to make the train stop the fly would have to be traveling really really fast

44,000/0.00025 = 176,000,000 m/s or 0.58 the speed of light

If this fly was able to travel at the speed of light it would actually push the train backwards, however according to Einstein, at the speed of light the fly would have infinite mass. Thus you could make the hypothesis that at some point between the fly being stationary and less than the speed of light the fly and the train would have equal mass but different velocities.
 
srhutch said:
gannet said:
that is way too complicated for this time of night :o

:?
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that's women for you :evil:
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Yes I have an over active imagination, this is both good and bad, bad because I am usually wide awake at 6:30 am on a weekend thinking about crap
 
Havent our friends at CERN addressed results that sugest that subatomic particles have gone faster than the speed of light and possible Einstein may have got it wrong ,also means time travel could be possible :roll:
 
If you are driving a Zed and a bear shits in the woods, is the Pope Catholic ? Conversely, if the Pope shits in the woods is the Bear driving the Zed and are you Catholic or is the Bear Catholic and are you driving a Benz ?? :headbang: :headbang:

As for the fly, parts of it change shape while other parts reverse so at no point in time is it actually motionless, the train does slow down but never ceases forward motion.
 
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