Coin Toss

jack.jackson

Well-Known Member
#2
Three academics—Persi Diaconis, Susan Holmes, and Richard Montgomery—through vigorous analysis made an interesting discovery at Stanford University. As they note in their published results, "Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss," laws of mechanics govern coin flips, meaning, "their flight is determined by their initial conditions."

The physics—and math—behind this discovery are very complex. But some of the basic ideas are simple: If the force of the flip is the same, the outcome is the same. To understand more about flips, the academics built a coin-tossing machine and filmed it using a slow-motion camera. This confirmed that the outcome of flips isn't random. The machine could make the toss come out heads every time.

Knife and Hatchet throwing use's the same principle. If you toss a coin, the exact same way each time, the results will remain constant. Now wheres those dice?:grin:
 
#3
Heh I thought about this when I was very young, maybe about 7 or 8.
I thought about not only the strength, but the shape of the finget, the joints, the muscles around the joints, the exactly wrinkles that the coin is resting on and the pivot points of the thumb joints and always thought that a sure outcome could be possible if calculated. Of course, I wasn't clever enough to think of a way to actually calculate it.
 
#4
When you build a machine that can exert same force on a coin and toss it exactly in the same way and catch it in exact same height , the mechanics of course play an important role. Its as trivial as one lap by a pendulum. The extent to which a pendulum swings beyond the center is governed exactly by the starting point. :cool2::devil::devil:
 
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