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Post by Cybermortis on Apr 27, 2013 12:17:27 GMT
Why am I thinking "Can you butter a whole room with explosives" and thinking of the experiment where they tried painting walls with explosives?... Thought experiment. Attach a knife to a long bit of wood, with a pivot at the far end. Hold at 1ft above a pack of butter, and release. Measure how far through the butter it goes... Repeat, but this time, heat the knife with a blow torch before you release. A pivoting knife system...or, would a guillotine system work better? Use the same model knife at various temperatures dropped from the same height everytime. Removes human error & strength differences from the equation. They already have a 'swing' rig that they've used with hammers. No reason they couldn't reuse it for this, and it would allow them to safely use knives (or any other type of blade) that was heated well beyond what would be safe for them to hold and use themselves. |
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Post by mrfatso on Jun 14, 2013 11:39:52 GMT
I always figured it meant how easy the knife went through, not necessarily any indication of the quality the cut made in the process. What? More variables? Measuring the amount and duration of the force require to slice through would make the testing of the literal meaning of this idiom rather too complex and 'nerdy' for a good TV science show. It might, however, make for a good research project for submission to The Annals of Improbable Research.  Just a little aside did you know that Sir Andre Konstantin Geim, who won the 2000 Ignobel prize for a levitating frog experiment latter jointly won the 2010 Nobel prize in Physics for his work with Graphene. |
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