Cons. of Energy: World Record Blob Jump

In this video lab students must think hard about energy transformations and use conservation of energy principles to calculate just how dangerous this stunt is!

Questions posed:

1) What is the maximum speed reached by the stuntman? Where is he located when he has this speed?

2) Assume that the three guys who drop from the platform onto the blob and the stuntman all have the same mass—call this mass m.  What is the gravitational potential energy of the three of them in total when standing on top of the platform?

3) What is the gravitational potential energy of the stuntman when he is at his highest point?

4) When taken together, do your answers to questions 2 and 3 support the concept of conservation of energy? Why or why not?

5) If four guys had jumped off the platform onto the blob, how high do you think the stuntman would have gotten? (You can still assume that everyone involved has the same mass.)

6) Could you keep adding more and more guys to the platform-jump team to launch the stuntman higher and higher? That is, could you keep adding guys indefinitely to launch the stuntman to an arbitrarily high height? Or would there be limiting factors that would limit the maximum height possible, even with an unlimited number of guys jumping? Explain.