Chapter 7, Problem 26P

You are lying in your bedroom, resting after doing your physics homework. As you stare at your ceiling, you come up with the idea for a new game. You grab a dart with a sticky nose and a mass of 19.0 g. You also grab a spring that has been lying on your desk from some previous project. You paint a target pattern on your ceiling. Your new game is to place the spring vertically on the floor, place the sticky-nose dart facing upward on the spring, and push the spring downward until the coils all press together, as on the right in Figure P7.26. You will then release the spring, firing the dart up toward the target on your ceiling, where its sticky nose will make it hang from the ceiling. The spring has an uncompressed end-to-end length of 5.00 cm, as shown on the left in Figure P7.26, and can be compressed to an end-to-end length of 1.00 cm when the coils are all pressed together. Before trying the game, you hold the upper end of the spring in one hand and hang a bundle of ten identical darts from the lower end of the spring. The spring extends by 1.00 cm due to the weight of the darts. You are so excited about the new game that, before doing a test of the game, you run out to gather your friends to show them. When your friends are in your room watching and you show them the first firing of your new game, why are you embarrassed?

Figure P7.26