they open my eyes to the facts

that we can understand and predict so

much of the everyday world around us

using math and equations so today I want

to revisit the classic high school

physics egg drop competition where you

have to build some sort of contraption

around an egg to make sure it doesn't

crack when it hits the ground originally

I wanted to do a bunch of research and

testing to find the single best way to

win the competition every time but what

I found out with that each competition

sort of has different rules in some

you're not allowed to use popcorn or

parachutes and in others you win if your

contraption is the smallest or the

lightest or both so i'm going to show

you five super easy options and then

we'll talk about why each one works

let's go crack some eggs

okay so let's start with the popcorn

ball the basic principles that you put

your egg in the middle of a box that

contains some kind of cushioning

materials such as bubble wrap or packing

peanuts or popcorn personally I think

this one is the most boring but it works

and that's why every shipping company

ever shipped this way i'm using a ball

here because it's more weight efficient

in a box where you have unnecessary

cushioning in the corners plus the

stretchiness of the ball will help

absorb assembly energy

the moment of truth and we have an

intact egg before I show you the other

four ideas let's talk about the science

behind landing with an uncracked egg so

the starter you dropped your egg is up

high and it's stationary so it has

potential energy which is the energy

associated with height so these red

blocks represent the potential energy

and the higher I go the more blocks of

energy I start and then as the egg fall

that potential energy is converted to

kinetic energy which is the energy of

speed so you start up high and every

single block is over here as potential

energy but as you start to fall and fall

faster and faster every single block

comes over here is kinetic energy or

speed and now your egg is about to

impact the ground and have all this

energy in the form of speed that got to

go somewhere now this broom represents

the standing energy that holds an

eggshell together it makes it hard so

the way to think about this is when your

egg hits the ground do you introduce

more energy than the binding energy of

the molecule holding the hard eggshell

together at any point you're going to

break at that point so the question that

becomes what can we do to keep our

blocks below the broom because simply

put below the broom your egg is safe

anything above the broom and your egg is

busted well there's two things we can do

the first is that we can make this pile

of green blocks not as tall this is why

no matter what your contraption is to

protect the egg if your rules allow it

you should make a parachute the bigger

the better and it does not have to be

fancy this is like old-school army guys

style just cut up

bag little bit of string little bit of

tape and just looking at this you can

see the difference a parachute could

make so the second thing you can do is

not to remove any green blocks by

reducing your speed but to spread them

out so if we say left to right as our

time axis the more we could stretch out

this impact event the more we can lower

that high energy spike and this is a

cool way to think about any two objects

impacted the longer the duration of the

impact the more you can spread out that

force so stuff doesn't break so for

example this is the point of car air

bags instead of your head hitting the

steering wheel and stopping near

instantaneously it stretches out the

impact force overtime so you don't get a

quick spite that exceeds the broom line

for your skull this is exactly why long

jumpers prefer to land it's sand and not

on asphalt and why parkour runners will

always roll after a big jump it's all

about defusing the force over a longer

period of time so what does that mean

for our egg contraptions it surely is

something to keep in mind because it can

make it more intuitive for example to

see why putting your egg in the middle

of a jar of peanut butter which is a

popular and not a very good idea isn't

as good as putting your egg in the

middle of a popcorn ball okay back to

the bridge

you

so a lot of people like to build

contraptions out of straws and in some

competitions that's all you have to work

with how you configure your straws

depends a little bit on how stiff they

are the good folks at wendys have fairly

stiff straws which means I didn't have

to use quite as many so my idea was to

take six like three inch long straws and

build a regular triangular pyramid and

then put the egg in the middle and then

I took two of the Wendy straws and join

them together to sort of make a mega

straw and I use this wide tape to help

prevent it from buckling and then I made

six of those mega straws and simply

taped one to each edge of the pyramid so

the main point here is that there are no

straws pointing directly at the egg when

it impacts the ground the force goes up

the stiffness path through the straw I

saw a ton of examples online where the

straw was actually pointed at the a we

could create a puncture load in our case

we have this pyramid so all the loads

path next to the egg so you don't get

that primary impact three two one so

you'll notice we've got a couple of

broken pieces but that's okay because it

took energy to make those breaks and

that sort of protect the shell of the

egg and receiving that energy so success

ok so our egg finally broke but it took

about 20 tries and you can see there's a

lot of busted straws here all in all it

was pretty resilient yeah

so this one is a throwback to my NASA

roots in 2004 the emmy our Rovers landed

on Mars using giant airbags and even

though Mars has one-third the gravity of

Earth I figured it would still work I

started by cushioning the egg in four

little balloons that I barely filled up

and then I blew up bigger balloons and

then just tied it all together with some

string and tape and then if there's any

gaps in coverage you can just tape a

balloon directly to the stream you just

tied around in addition to the balloons

extending the impact time this design

benefits from a large cross-sectional

area relative to his weight so in a

sense it becomes its own parachute of

course if your rules allow it you should

still throw an additional parachute on

it anyways stop it from

I'm 2012 we landed another rover on Mars

called curiosity but this one was too

big to use airbags so we had to have a

power to send pretty much like a jet