It sounds like a simple challenge, but we bet your time is terrible. The latest episode of MinutePhysics explains.
Balancing a top-heavy pencil on its tip for an extended period of time is extremely difficult, because it’s almost as if it wants to fall down. Any little nudge will push it off balance, and then gravity will pull its centre of mass even more off balance, and over and over again until it finally falls over. In mathematics, this is described as the inverted pendulum.
If a perfectly balanced pencil with a perfectly sharpened tip was to get knocked off balance by one ten-thousandth of the width of an atom, it would it would take only three seconds for it to fall over. Watch the latest episode of MinutePhysics above to find out why.
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