this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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@porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml
I assume, he expected the hammer to bounce back to approximately the same hight as it was dropped from, like the ball would do it without the hammer. Similarly to the bowling ball pendulum, he would then bravely look at the hammer bouncing back towards his head but missing it's hypothetical aim (his head) by a few centimetres.
Yes the issue is that he pushed it downwards a bit, and also the ball gives some of its energy to the hammer. This means that the hammer is travelling faster and thus goes higher than he expected.
The ball gave a big chunk of its energy to the hammer. The ball doesn't have the density that the hammer does (we think of the hammer as much heavier as the ball, but in reality that big yoga ball might be around around 2/3 the weight of the hammer), but it's the overall weight that matters.
So if 40% of the weight/momentum of the whole system is in the ball going down, and half of that gets transferred back to the hammer coming up, while the hammer has 90% of its momentum (originally 60% of the system) preserved in the bounce, we're talking about enough roughly 74% of the original momentum (54% of the original system momentum plus 20% of the original system momentum) pushing 60% of the original system mass, enough to exceed the original height.
Some of the height is lost to the angular momentum of the spinning hammer, but one can see how this experiment could've bounced the hammer higher than it started, even without any downward momentum being contributed by the guy pushing it downward.
From the spin on the hammer after it hits his face it looks like there was a lot more energy left, but I'm no physicist so I have no idea where it's from.
Yes, I'm unsure whether he's just guiding both bodies of if he actually pushes them, but if, it's just slightly. The vast majority of the additional momentum of the hammer comes from the ball. You can see just how low the ball bounces back. Not even half of its initial height. The 'missing' momentum (or energy) is mostly transfered to the hammer, the rest is dissipation.