Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Polly, and I'm a brand new ping pong ball. Um.
Check it out. I've still got that new ping pong ball smell. Actually, do you have any deodorant? Wouldn't want to get stinky out there. My pal Patty and I were all cozy in our ping pong box just this morning. Cozy and safe and not flying through the air. That's Patty out there now. Look at her go.
Back and forth, up and down. Woo! Go, Patty! Sure does look fun. Okay. Actually, can I be real with you for a second? The truth is, I've got a terrible fear of heights. And I'm so bouncy. Oh, why, oh, why, oh, why couldn't I have been a bowling ball? Or a hockey puck?
The first thing you need to know to understand why ping pong balls bounce so high is that energy can't be created or destroyed.
My name is Dr. Kylie Kennedy and I am a physicist at Princeton University where I do research on the tiniest particles in the universe. Okay, so let's think about what's happening when we drop a ping pong ball. When you hold a ping pong ball and you just drop it on the ground, what first is happening is the ping pong ball is falling. And in the moment that it contacts the ground, the ping pong ball kind of goes squish.
So this energy of the movement of the ping pong ball kind of helps squish the ball a little bit. But because the ball is very springy, it's made of this plastic that acts like a spring. It bounces back. And as the ball slows, as it goes higher and higher, that kinetic energy of movement is actually getting converted back into gravitational energy. Um, uh,
So ping pong balls bounce so high by changing energy from gravity into energy of movement. When a ping pong ball is hit, it goes up in the air. Then when it lands, it turns the energy from gravity into energy that squishes it like a spring. Then that spring energy is unleashed and the ball goes rocketing up once again.
That's pretty cool. And learning briefly distracted me from my otherwise all-consuming dread. Quick, more facts. The world record for the longest ping pong rally where the ball was kept in play without any stopping is more than 13 hours. Ping pong was originally called whiff-waff. It's been an Olympic sport since 1988. ♪
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