Egg drop

Fun experiment with eggs and glasses of water

And now for a fun ex­per­i­ment that you'll want to re­peat over and over again!

Safe­ty pre­cau­tions

None.

Equip­ment

  • card­board cylin­ders;
  • eggs;
  • 2 glass­es of wa­ter;
  • sheet of card­board (20x20 cm)(8x8 inch­es).

Step-by-step in­struc­tions

Set a card­board sheet (20x20 cm) on top of two glass­es of wa­ter. Ar­range two card­board cylin­ders on the sheet of card­board so that they are pre­cise­ly aligned with the glass­es. Bal­ance an egg on top of each card­board cylin­der. Knock the sheet of card­board hor­i­zon­tal­ly away in one swift mo­tion. Ob­serve as the eggs fall neat­ly into the glass­es of wa­ter!

Process de­scrip­tion

When the card­board is knocked away, the cylin­ders are hit from be­low. They spin and fall. Their tra­jec­to­ry is not hor­i­zon­tal, and not par­al­lel to the eggs rest­ing on them. This spe­cif­ic tra­jec­to­ry al­lows the cylin­ders’ mo­tion to prac­ti­cal­ly not af­fect their re­spec­tive eggs; rather, they sim­ply quick­ly spin and col­lapse out from un­der them. The eggs are left with­out sup­port, and as the only sig­nif­i­cant force act­ing on them is grav­i­ty, they fall ver­ti­cal­ly down – di­rect­ly into the glass­es.