Tuesday, January 24, 2012

If I set up an infinite line of dominoes on earth will the dominoes continue to fall infinitely?

If I set up an infinite line of dominoes on earth will the dominoes continue to fall infinitely or eventually would the chain reaction of dominoes cease?|||They will fall infinitely because potential energy is stored in every domino from setting it upright which will provide the energy to topple the next domino and overcome the friction as the dominoes rub together as they fall no matter how many dominoes you have topple.|||You must be joking. Ah well. People can think how they want. That's simply saying you need infinite energy to cause an infinite topple. That's like common sense.

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|||I agree with Todd... By the way if you know the answer then why post the question? Good luck!

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|||It's a stupid question if you meant it like that.

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|||You can't physically have an infinite line of dominoes in the normal sense, but yes it would fall infinitely. Imagine dominoes in a loop and a machine rights them back up as fast as they fall. It actually wouldn't be that hard to design. Just have the dominoes on fixed pins so they're ease to right and use a moving magnet on a track to stand them up again. Or two large stationary ones that you can switch on and off. The dominoes would have to have metal in them, of course.|||Earth has been understood as a body of finite size since the year 195 BCE.





Earth is not infinite in size, and neither would such a domino chain be infinite.











If you had a set of dominoes, each 5cm in long dimension...and you spaced them each 3cm apart...





It would take 220 million dominoes to encircle the equator of Earth.








IF each collision lasted 1 second each, it would take 7 years from the first domino to the final domino. The final domino couldn't crash in to any other domino, because all the rest of the dominoes are knocked down.








THAT IS ASSUMING, that the energy doesn't eventually dissipate from the previous domino.





Eventually, you'd get a domino that doesn't knock down upon receiving the impulse. But rather, it'd just rock back and forth about to tip, and eventually rock back to stability. End of the falling chain might come much sooner than expected.|||It would seem to me that since gravity is really at the root of your domino chain reaction, that the only way to stop them falling would to end the effects of gravity. also another way to stop this is to actually have an end point to infinity. the only way for that to come true would be to end the universe, in theory ending that would cause infinity to collapse in on itself. this is only my opinion, but seeing as these two things will likely be in place forever, then your domino chain would probably continue on forever as well. Great theoretical question! Good luck!|||Yes. I mean No.





The earth has a finite size.So you can not set up an infinite number. Besides, it would take forever to set them up.





But if you set up a very large number, say a billion, and it took a tenth of a second per collision, then it would take 100,000,000 seconds for the last one to fall.





Roughly 30,000 days, or 100 years.


Good luck with that.|||Besides the fact that it would be impossible because it would take infinity to set up (it already takes forever to set up a couple dominoes ;) ), it would take infinite materials, and it would take infinite space, yes they would fall forever. The concept of infinity means there is no bound.|||Assuming the conditions for the first domino to fall is the same as the next, then it could go on forever. But it would require an infinite number of dominoes and an infinitely large place to put them, not to mention the set-up time is problematic. :)|||It's impossible anyway, but it will be infinite. how fast does the universe expand .vs how fast dominoes fall. i think we know the answer :)|||I don't see why it wouldn't cease. The last domino will fall, and that will be that.|||good luck getting that many dominoes. (No it will go forever.)

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