Nov 24 2005
The Physics of Cow Tipping
Now, I grew up on a farm and have done a lot of things that city kids never got to do, but one of the joys of farm life I never participated in was — you guessed it — cow tipping. Cow tipping is the stuff of legend, or at least the stuff of tall stories around the farm. Everybody seemed to know someone who had been ‘tipping, but no one would actually admit to having done it themselves.
Now it turns out that cow tipping is if not impossible, at least improbable. The idea is to sneak up on a hapless bovine in the middle of the night, give a hefty shove in a lateral direction, and over they go.
Some researchers with way too much time on their hands have analyzed the phenomenon and determined that the physics doesn’t add up.
From the [UK] Times Online:
Margo Lillie, a doctor of zoology at the University of British Columbia, and her student Tracy Boechler have conducted a study on the physics of cow-tipping.Ms Boechler, now a trainee forensics analyst for the Royal Canadian Mounted Corps, concluded in her initial report that a cow standing with its legs straight would require five people to exert the required force to bowl it over.
A cow of 1.45 metres in height pushed at an angle of 23.4 degrees relative to the ground would require 2,910 Newtons of force, equivalent to 4.43 people, she wrote.
Dr Lillie, Ms Boechler’s supervisor, revised the calculations so that two people could exert the required amount of force to tip a static cow, but only if it did not react.
“The static physics of the issue say . . . two people might be able to tip a cow,‿ she said. “But the cow would have to be tipped quickly — the cow’s centre of mass would have to be pushed over its hoof before the cow could react.‿
Newton’s second law of motion, force equals mass multiplied by acceleration, shows that the high acceleration necessary to tip the cow would require a higher force. “Biology also complicates the issue here because the faster the [human] muscles have to contract, the lower the force they can produce. But I suspect that even if a dynamic physics model suggests cow tipping is possible, the biology ultimately gets in the way: a cow is simply not a rigid, unresponding body.‿
August 25th, 2006 at 08:42 am
My beloved husband revealed this fact (that there is actually no such thing as cow tipping) shortly after we were married. Most of my life, I believed my brother when he told me that he and his friends went “cow tipping”. I think my husband was protecting me from further embarrassment. (o: