That means that the distribution of mass makes the bottle slow down and increases the chances of a successful landing,” says Dekker. “Based on our experiments, we showed that the mass of a rotating object spreads throughout the object, reducing the velocity. In fact, the water bottles and tennis balls behaved the same way. “We didn’t look at the water in the bottle as fluid, but instead assumed it to behave as something rigid,” one of the student researchers Pim Dekker told Michaela Nesvarova at U Today earlier this year. With a partially full bottle, however, the water spreads out as it spins, changing the rotational speed. According to the study, landing a full bottle is almost impossible because the rotational speed of the bottle doesn’t change. In practical terms, the team found that the best flipping bottle is one between 20 and 41 percent full. What they found is that a flip that causes the greatest decrease in angular velocity was most likely to stick the landing. They then analyzed the videos and boiled the movements down to physical formulas. Using a high-resolution camera, they filmed flip after flip of full and partially full water bottles as well as bottles containing two tennis balls. That’s why, reports Mindy Weisberger at LiveScience, a group of young researchers recently published an article demonstrating how to land a water bottle every single time.Īccording to a press release, five first-year students at the University of Twente decided to unravel the physics of the water bottle challenge for a class on Dynamics & Relativity. The craze may have faded, but the physics still remains. Kids around the country chronicled their successes and failures on YouTube while the crinkling of tossed water bottles drove their parents crazy. Just flip a full or half-empty plastic water bottle so it lands upright. The concept is simple, but it’s easier said than done. In 2016, the youth of America were obsessed with this one cool trick: the water-bottle challenge.
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