Inspired by Scroge McDuck, of course. We were discussing how you could not swim in gold coins because they stack together and form into a more solid entity, and are not fluid like water. And then we were talking about ball pits and she asked if she had gold marbles in a swimming pool could she swim in those?
I answered no originally but then realized, I don’t know for sure.
In: Physics
If the marbles in an irregular pile, then you could, kind of.
But imagine if you had a swimming pool that was, say, exactly 20000 marbles wide and exactly 100000 marbles long. In that case, marbles could settle into perfect rectangular sheets, all lined up just right, and those sheets would be absolutely rigid. You couldn’t move a sheet like that unless you were strong enough to crush glass.
So it matters a lot how organized the marbles are. If they’re piled in every which way, they’d behave more like a fluid. If they formed a big “crystal” of neat vertical and horizontal rows, they’d be much more like a solid and diving into that would equal severe pain.
It would also matter what kind of stroke you used. If you try to kick up and down in marbles, it would be extremely hard to move your legs down into a pile of marble and so not much would happen. But if you stroked across the surface, like a breaststroke, the marbles would have a much easier time flowing horizontally and you’d be able to push off against them.
Latest Answers