TSB 4: Basketball
judygrear94
Registered Users, Member 2 Posts
Welcome back to the True Strength of BFDI, where we use real-life physics and math to quantify the most astounding feats of BFB's 64 contestants. Today we investigate Basketball.
In terms of scenes that stick out in terms of strength, Basketball has only one. She says in BFB 1 after stopping Blocky's fall that she is "too bouncy", but how bouncy exactly is too bouncy?
Bounciness has an easy measurement in physics: elasticity and the spring constant. The spring constant is how much force a spring or other elastic material exerts on an object it is attached to when it is stretched or squeezed. It has a simple formula (that took a really long time for me to learn of) where the spring constant is the force divided by how much the length of the material changes. For force, we multiply Blocky's mass by the gravitational acceleration of 9.8 m/s. Blocky is a block of wood about 1 meter on each side. Wood has an average density of 600 kg/m3, so Blocky has a mass of 600 kg. Multiplying that by the gravitational acceleration and we get 5,880 N of force. Slowing down the scene, Basketball is compressed to about 1/3 of her height which I assume is 1.5 meters, similar to 8-Ball, so Blocky compresses Basketball by 1 meter. No need for division because anything divided by 1 is itself, so Basketball has a spring constant of 5,880 N/m. In layman's terms, it would take 600 kg of force to compress her by 1 m, and she'd then push back with the same 600 kg. So yeah. Pretty bouncy, I'd say.