Are you planning your Thanksgiving dinner? Make sure to include the Tablecloth Trick for the pre-dinner entertainment.
First, make sure you have a tablecloth without a seam or an edge. A frayed edge that hasn’t been sewn is perfect. Lay the tablecloth on the table and stack a few of your friend’s dishes on it. Never use your own, just in case. The dishes stay in place when you pull downward quickly and whip the tablecloth out from under them.
The Tablecloth Trick works thanks to the Law of Inertia – the tendency for an object to stay at rest until a force acts upon it.
But why stop there? Why not add a new trick on top of whipping the tablecloth? Lay a plate on the tablecloth and then stack three glasses filled with water on top of the plate. For extra heart pounding
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The Egg Drop is a classic experiment that illustrates Newton’s First Law of Motion and inertia. The goal is to get the egg into the glass of water. Sound easy?
Now perch the egg atop a cardboard tube sitting in a pie pan on top of the glass of water. Sound harder? It’s easier than you think – hit the pie pan with your hand, setting it in motion. As it zips out of the way, the lip catches the cardboard tube and takes it with. The egg is not moving, it is stationary. The support comes out from under the egg so for a brief nanosecond the egg does not move, until gravity takes over and pulls it down into the glass.
