Egg Inertia
The laws of motion are all around us! Newton’s first law of motion states that an object in motion will stay in motion, unless acted upon by another force. Imagine rolling a ball on your table. That ball is going to keep rolling until something else happens to it! Maybe it slows down because of friction on the table, or you put your hand in front to stop it, or it rolls off the table! Another force we see often is inertia. Inertia is the tendency of a moving object, to stay in motion. In a car, if you slam on the breaks, you would keep moving. This is why we have seatbelts - to control the inertia of us moving inside the car.
In this experiment, we will get the egg (or a ball for an easy cleanup) into a cup without touching the ball, by using force! The egg or ball in your experiment is balancing on a toilet paper tube and pie tin, and is still - it wants to remain this way. When you knock the pie tin sideways, you are exerting a force, and moving the pie tin out of the way. The lip of the pie tin transfers this force to the toilet paper roll, also moving this out of the way. For a split second, the egg is stationary, until gravity pulls the egg down, and into the cup!
