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rookie1ja
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What if u throw the ball to ur other hand?

Is it valid?

well in the question it says throw as hard as you can so thowing the ball to the other hand wont work, gd try m8

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Well, you must factor in the Coreolis effect of the earth........

...

Everyone's thinking too hard. No one here ever just threw a ball up in the air and caught it?

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We should consider the non-biotic factors here, like the wind, which may affect the direction of the ball and you were unable to catch it. Well, you can throw a heavier ball so you can catch it, ignoring the wind (for example, the bowling ball

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This is not as elegant a solution, but...

If you were on a planet with just the right mass and diameter, you're hardest throw in the right direction would allow the ball to orbit the planet once (or twice, etc. depending on the constants just mentioned).

here's why that's a problem. the earth's diameter is about 7900 miles. when the ball is thrown it will not only be traveling around the world but also falling. what that means is that the ball has to travel 7900 miles before it falls 6 feet. with some physics (or a stop watch) we find that an object falls to the earth from 6 feet in about 0.61 seconds. convert 7900 miles per 0.61 seconds to mph and you get 46,622,951 mph!! earth's escape velocity is 25000 mph. so once you threw the ball at 47,000,000 mph it would just keep going out into space instead of curving around the earth.

sorry

Well......

Anything travelling that speed through our upper atmosphere (mesosphere) will instantly incinerate due to friction. Anything travelling that speed near the surface, where the density of the air is tremendous (compared to outer space), will never reach that speed. But IF it did it would explode like a bolide (<!-- m --><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor#Bolide" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor#Bolide</a><!-- m -->), IF it didn't incinerate first, because infinite acceleration (which is necessary to bypass these effects) doesn't exist, but IF it did, the Earth would probably be destroyed in the process since F = ma (Newton's Second Law) would generate infinite force which would tear a chunk out of the particular hemisphere of the earth where the infinite acceleration experiment is being conducted. This is a conservative guess. Well, this chunk would seperate and decrease the overall mass of the Earth by perhaps 30% and the resulting pieces would spiral in towards the Sun over the course of several decades. So, our oceans would evaporate, then we would evaporate, then the earth would melt as its being sucked in to provide more fuel for the unrelenting sun. We'll ONLY live to see this if we don't all get ejected from the surface of the planet and flung out into space due to the unavoidable whiplash/shockwave of the earth-shattering explosion. Or, all of the molten rock in the core would spill out (of this huge hole the size of the Pacific) and cover what's left of the earth. Either way, we're toast.

So, kids, don't try this at home.

Of course, the obvious solution is to throw it straight up..

My best solution is to take it very literally and say that you travel to the intergalactic void discovered recently in the headlines, and only there will the ball not hit anything. "Outer space" isn't good enough... solar winds and dust particles litter our solar system (<!-- m --><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_dust_cloud" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_dust_cloud</a><!-- m -->), especially along the ecliptic plane, and very much so within a few thousand miles of earth (tons of rocket debris). Interstellar space could suffice, if it weren't for the average value of a million particles per cubic meter. Intergalactic space (at least 1 million light years aways, to be sure) will do just fine for this experiment. Since there is only about 10 to 100 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter, so the statistical probability of actually hitting one of these atoms can be greatly reduced by throwing a very tiny ball... but the ball must be very massive in order for its gravity to interact with the spaceship's which you used to travel the million light years. Since it took so long to get out there, you can wait the few extra years for the weak gravitational interaction to pull it back towards you after you threw it as hard as you could, which was very hard, since it weighs a ton or so. But, now its more than several cubic meters in diameter, so we know for sure that it's going to hit at least a few of those hydrogen atoms. So we must ask, 1)How few atoms constitute a negligible collision? 2)If one atom is too many, then will the trade off of travelling to the intergalactic void, allow us to have a large enough ball, which will then hit "nothing" yet be sufficiently large enough to get pulled back in by our spaceship all while resisting our strongest throw and not flying completely free of our ship's weak grasp? Oh yeah, the void is about 10 billion light years away. Much further.

It's too much!!! Ahh!!

yeah, let me know what you think!!

-Jason

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Oh yeah, if you want to stay on earth you could travel to Houston, TX and check out NASA's Johnson Space Center. There they have SESL, the Space Environment Simulation Lab. It's a large vacuum chamber that will approximate the crude vacuum of a near-earth satellite orbit. It is large enough to get inside of (they can put the whole shuttle into it) and the ceiling is quite high. You can throw the ball up as hard as you can but it may hit the ceiling. So, you either need a weak 3-year old girl to throw it or have a very heavy ball that is harder to throw. Not too heavy though, because catching it will get tricky as it approaches the size of a bowling ball. Keep in mind that the original puzzle stated to throw a ball as hard as you can.

There are few enough particles to hit in this chamber that for all intents and purposes the collisions can be considered negligible. This would definitely not be the case even on top of a high mountian with thin air.

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I must have misunderstood the concept of 'Brain Teaser'. I didn't realize I'd have to be

up on 'string theory' and well grounded in theoretical physics to solve this one.

Throwing the ball straight up...... naaaaaahhhh. Just not sexy enough.

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Rubik, I believe you are quite intelligent, in your way of thinking, but do not strain yourself....A puzzle with an answer as simple as throwing it vertically should not be overstressed.

Well done, though. Your research and knowledge of astrology is impressive.

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Easy. Just throw it up in the air directly above you. It'll come back down without anything but gravity helping it. And the question said nothing about gravity. So if this isn't right, reword the question.

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easy...nothing said about direction of the ball when thrown...throw the ball straight up as hard as you can, (gravity) which keeps you on your computer writing these teasers, will bing it back...

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I don't think I have ever... in my life... heard more people attempting to sound intelligent that are really very s****d creatures....

I literally had to register for this website because I was so very angered that all of you could be so r******d.

Throw the ball up into the air... straight up

Elevator - the guy is a short man... on days it rains he can use his umbrella to hit the high numbers

The petri dish with organisms... It doesn't matter about one will consume more than the others and will be a different size, and the one dipsh!t that had the cell count and cm2 used...

umm... if it is full at 12 and it doubles every minute, that means it was half full 1 minute prior... at 11:59

Your feeble attempts at apearing smart are actually exposing you to be quite unintelligent...

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