🚀 go-pugleaf

Last Saturday at the Fall meeting of the So. Cal. Section of
AAPT, Art Huffman from UCLA brought up the question of what
the monkey and hunter demo would look like if we arranged
for the entire room to go into free fall during the demo.
Of course the simple answer is readily obtained from an
appeal to the principle of equivalence, but Art went on to
show us a piece of apparatus he had built that actually put
 TWO "hunters" aiming at TWO "monkeys" in a "falling room!"

The "falling room" consisted of a lucite box about a meter
on a side.  It was attached to a cable and winch and raised
to the top of a small tower from which it would then be
released.  Two electronically activated guns on one side of
the room were aimed toward small holes in the opposite wall
that were covered with mesh-like socks to catch the balls.
To reach their targets, the balls also had to pass through
an interior wall that had small holes positioned on a direct
line from the gun to the target.

When the guns were fired without dropping the room, the
balls didn't even make it through the holes in the interior
wall.  But, of course, if the room was falling when the guns
fired, both balls passed cleanly through the holes in the
interior wall and were caught by the mesh socks over the
holes in the far wall.

Possibly the best aspect of the demo was that the "falling
room" DID provide enough of a reference system for observers
(who were still in a NONfalling room!) to believe that the
trajectories were, in fact, straight lines in that reference
frame.

John Mallinckrodt
Cal Poly Pomona
ajmallinckro@csupomona.edu