The Phone Book Myth

Apparently if you interweave the pages of two phone books together they are nearly impossible to pull apart.  These two Dutch students won first place in a Mythbusters challenge demonstrating as much.  Very cool experiment, but I think they should have been disqualified for referring to kilograms as units of force.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 4:48 am and is filed under Cool Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.

3 Responses to “The Phone Book Myth”

1. links for 2008-03-24 Says:
   March 24th, 2008 at 4:23 pm

   [...] Flashpoint: The Phone Book Myth [...]

2. Josh Says:
   April 13th, 2008 at 4:11 am

   I’m sure they were using the term “Kilograms” as short hand for “kg/m” (or whatever the equivalent of psi is). In America we DO say “pounds of force” when we really mean psi or foot pounds.

3. Jesse Says:
   July 21st, 2008 at 10:49 am

   Josh, I hope you realize that pounds are force.
   psi is pressure.
   kilograms are not force, but I think it’s easier for people to understand what sort of stress the phonebooks could handle when you express in something they weigh their own bodies with.

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