A physics questions...how to drop an egg and have it land on someone's head?

Question

Ok...here's the problem. Person A has an egg and is standing at the top of a set of bleachers. Person B is walking at a constant rate past these bleachers. The objective is for Person A to drop the egg at a certain point so that it successfully hits Person B. What relationships should I be looking at mathematically? How would I go about developing a procedure in figuring out how to perform this with success?

I'm guessing this is just basic physics...I know some kinematics equations that might be used, but I'm not sure.

Thank you in advance for any help.

Answer 1

This is the same idea behind the Norden bombsight of WW2 (see wiki article). If it hadn't been declassified in the late 40s, I'd have to kill you if I told you how it's done.

Okay, the simple version fo this problem is that Person B will walk a distance of vT, where v is his walking speed and T is the time elapsed since Person A has dropped the egg. The egg will fall distance D = (1/2) g T², where T is the time elapsed since the release of the egg, and g is the gravitional acceleration constant, roughly 9.8 meters/second². So, if you know the distance of the drop from Person A to the ground, then you can calculate T as follows:

T = √(2gD)

from which we know that the distance Person B will travel is

v√(2gD)

Thus, Person A should release the egg just when Person B is at distance v√(2gD) from the impact zone. This can be viewed by Person A as being at a certain angle from plumb, which is the basic idea behind the Norden bombsight.

Answer 2

make a few gak begin with quite lower than two liters of water (just below two kg) and upload corn starch till it's approximately the consistency of pudding, stir very good. at lower than a cm thick i finished an egg from two reviews. make certain to scan till you uncover the correct consistency.