I fall into the catagory of a Phys-lers who found the Worm Problem
interesting but much to busy to sit down and think about it and I haven't
followed all the postings on the problem very carefully.
So I gave it to 14 yr. old physics genius, Chris Hirata. As a 13 year old,
Chris was selected to the U.S. Physics Olympiad team and earned a gold
medal in Norway with the highest U.S. score and 5th highest in the world
out of 259 participants. I verbally stated the problem to Chris and
unintentionally did not indicate that the crawling and stretching were
discrete event. Basically, I stated that a worm was crawling on a 1 km
rubber rope at 1 cm/s that was being stetched by a tractor at the rate of 1
km/s. How long would it take the worm to reach the other end. (See, I
didn't even remember the original formulation of the problem very well).
Anyway, Chris assumed that the crawling and stretching were continuous
events and this morning he walked in with a two page solution that for v =
1000 m/s,
w = 0.01 m/s, and Lo = 1000 m, the time to finish is
Tf = 2.81 x 10^43,429 seconds
Does anyone know if this is correct? If this has already been posted, I
humbly apologized for being inattentive.
Then I showed Chris the Original Problem Formulation received this morning
and John Malinckroft's solution for n discrete event and Chris pronounced
it as correct (Thanks Chris).
More on Chris: Chris has come up with a program for his TI-85 calculator
which will find the resistance of any resistor network that you can design
as long as the memory of the calculator is not exceeded. Basically, he
identifies and numbers all the connection points of the resistor network
and enters the total number into his calculator. Then the program asks for
the reciprocal of the resistance between every possible pair of connection
points. When finished entering the data, the calculator outputs the total
resistance. We've tried his program on all the complicated resistor
networks we know of where the total resistance was known and it works.
I asked Chris if his solution procedure (unknown to me) was original. He
said it was original to him but can't imagine that it is original in the
worldwide physics community. Is anyone familiar with such a solution
technique?
If you have the December, 1995 issue of TPT, you can see the type of work
this young man was capable of as an 11 yr. old in the article on the period
of non-simple harmonic motion. He receive e-mail from all over the world
commenting on his solution and some letter were published in TPT.
bye, DiRT
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David R. Thiessen FUN + PHYSICS = PHUN
Science Department PHYSICS IS PHUN !!
Deerfield High School
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dthiessn@nslsilus.org (Quote sources long forgotten)
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