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Cracking the Whip: Strings, Chains and Dinosaurs
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A cracking whip is invariably surprising. What generates such a stunning sound? In this lecture, through simple demonstrations of whips and chains on a pulley, Professor Goriely builds simple models to explain the extreme acceleration that takes place in the motion of ropes.
In particular, he shows how these models have solutions that blow up to infinity and learns, like the dinosaurs did, how to tame these infinities to produce a stunning crack.
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I. I. Glass. Shock Waves and Man. University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, Toronto, 1974.
Alain Goriely and Tyler McMillen. Shape of a cracking whip. Physical Review Letters, 88(24):244301, 2002.
P. Krehl, S. Engemann, and D. Schwenkel. The puzzle of whip cracking: Uncovered by a correlation of whip-tip kinematics with shock wave emission? Shock Waves, 8(1):1–9, 1998.
Tyler McMillen and Alain Goriely. Whip waves. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 184(14):192–225, 2003. [5] David W. Morgan. Whips and Whipmaking. Cornell Maritime Press, 2 edition, 2004.
This event was on Tue, 15 Sep 2026
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