Final Blog Post

Nuclear Protection

Lots of people love to watch action movies, where there is exploration, action, and most importantly explosions. In the movie Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, there is all of these qualities and more. The movie in fact starts out with a fight scene and the goes on and shows our hero survive a nuclear explosion. Now you may ask, how did our hero survive the explosion? The answer to that is that he climbed inside a lead lined refrigerator and was sent flying off into the distance. The problem that I am looking at has to deal with projectile motion and how Indiana Jones was sent flying while hiding in this refrigerator.

There are a couple of aspects that we should take into account when it comes to looking at our problem. The first aspect is how high does the refrigerator travel after being hit by the explosion. We can find the answer to this by using the equation y=1/2(Vyi+Vyf)t ,but there are parts of this equation that we need to find out before we can solve this portion. The first thing we can find is Vyf and this is easy because it is just the final speed the refrigerator will be traveling at which is zero when it stops on the ground. Now we have to find out exactly how long Indiana Jones was in the air, and we can do this by watching the movie clip and time how long he is flying through the air. By counting when the nuke that has gone off and hit the buildings and when he comes to a stop a total of 20 seconds have gone by. Now that we have t we can solve for Vyi by using the equation Vyi=-ayt. We already know t and ay because t is the time that passed and ay is just the force of gravity which is -9.8m/s^2. Once we put these numbers in we learn Vyi is 196m/s. Now that we have all of our pieces we find that the refrigerator was sent 1960m into the air.

Now that we know how high the refrigerator was thrown we now need to learn how far it was thrown from its original position. The equation to do this is d=Vxi*t and again we already have a piece which is t. Since we already have t we now need to find Vxi. In order to find this we first need to find and angle at which Indiana Jones is launched and since that is hard to do due to the clip we will assume he is launched at a 45 degree angle. Now that we have an angle we can solve for Vxi by using the equation Vxi=Vyi/tanΘ. By plugging in the numbers that we already have we learn that Vxi is 196m/s due to Vyi being 196 and the tanΘ being 1. So now that we have Vxi we can now find the distance and by multiplying Vxi by t we learn that the refrigerator was thrown 3920m into the distance.

The last thing that we need to find now is how fast the refrigerator was going right before it hit the ground. Since the refrigerator was launched at an angle, the speed is the square root of Vx^2+Vy^2. We use this equation because the problem is symmetric and the refrigerator will land at the same angle that it was launched at. First we can get rid of the square root and the squares because they just cancel each other out. Next we need to find what Vx and Vy are. To find this we just take the final velocities of both and subtract the initial velocities of both. Since both have final velocities of 0 and initial velocities of 196 they both are just added together. We learn that the refrigerator right before it hits the ground is moving at a total of 392m/s.      

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