In Edmund Rostand\'s famous play, Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano in an attempt to di
ID: 1965647 • Letter: I
Question
In Edmund Rostand's famous play, Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano in an attempt to distract a suitor from visiting Roxanne, claims to have descended to earth from the moon and proclaims to have invented 6 novel and fantastical methods for traveling to the moon. One is as follows.Sitting on an iron platform|thence
To throw a magnet in the air. This is
A method well conceived|the magnet
flown,Infallibly the iron will pursue:
Then quick! relaunch your magnet, and you thus
Can mount and mount unmeasured distances!
In an old cartoon, there is another version of this method. A character in the old west is on a hand-pumped two-person rail car. After getting tired of pumping the handle up and down to make the car move along the
rails, he takes out a magnet and holds it in front of the cart hanging from a shing pole. The magnet pulls the cart towards it, which pushes the magnet forward, which. . . so the cart just moves forward continually.
What do you think of these methods? Can some version of them work? Discuss in terms of the physics you have learned
Explanation / Answer
Neither method can work. If you throw a magnet from an iron platform, you create a force equal and opposite to the force you created by throwing the magnet. When the magnet returns, you will be right back where you started from. Holding a magnet from a fishing pole on a two-person rail car will not work either. The fishing pole and the rail car are all part of the same system working toward each other. This could only work if another train or rail car, separate from the original rail car, were moving away from the rail car with a magnet in a near enough position such that the magnet would attract the rail car towards it.