Eli5 why hippos can’t swim because of their weight yet blue whales can
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Isn’t that like saying why can’t 18wheeler trucks float but a cruise ship can? They’re both heavy but they have different purposes and designs
Well one is designed by nature to be long with a tail and in water and swim, the other has 4 fat legs underneath a short stout body.
Weight doesn’t determine wether or not something floats, density does.
Archimedes’s law says “ a body immersed in a fluid experiences an upthrust equal to the weight of the fluid displaced”, which is is fancy way of saying that if an object is heavier than the (in this case) water it displaces, is sinks. If the opposite is true, it floats.
A rock sinks in water because it is more dense, a ball on the other hand shoots up to the surface because it is far less dense than water. The denser the rock, the faster it sinks, the less dense the ball, the faster it rises.
From this knowledge we can deduce that a hippo is denser than water, and therefore sinks. The opposite is true for the blue whale, which is why it floats.
This is why the imperial system sucks. Weight is arbitrary in this situation. What’s more important is mass and volume. A hippo has a greater mass to volume ratio than a whale. The difference in the mass of a whale to a hippos is less than the volume of a hippo to a whale. The ratio of mass to volume in an object is its desity.
It’s the same reason you can throw a 1 gram stone into water and it sinks, but a 100kg wooden log will float.
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