Young Australian Skeptics

I got this sent to me via email the other day. It’s one of those thousands of mails you get sent with a feel good message that if you have bothered to read to the end tells you a small child in Borneo will die if you don’t annoy 10 more friends by forwarding it to them.

So I’m saving myself the time and posting it here instead. Here it is …

A Japanese freighter had been torpedoed during WWII and it’s at the bottom of Tokyo Harbor with a large hole in her hull. A team of engineers was called together to solve the problem of raising the wounded vessel to the surface. One of the engineers tackling this puzzle said he remembered seeing a Donald Duck cartoon when he was a boy where there was a boat at the bottom of the ocean with a hole in its hull, and they injected it with ping-​​pong balls and it floated up. The skeptical group laughed but one of the experts was willing to give it a try. Of course, where in the world would you find twenty million ping-​​pong balls but in Tokyo? It turned out to be the perfect solution. The balls were injected into the hull and it floated to the surface, the engineer was altered. Moral– solutions to problems are always found at an entirely different level; also, believe in yourself in the face of impossible odds.

My burgeoning skeptic mind was brimming at this one and I was interested to see if this would actually be possible. I found an episode of Mythbusters that tested this very story for its validity. It turns out that this is actually a plausible scenario. Well with a few caveats. You see during their testing they discovered that for even a relatively small vessel the number of ping pong balls required would be astronomical. And the other issue was that the ping pong balls kept finding escape routes. Here is a picture of WW2 Japanese freighter the ‘Okikawa Maru’. You would expect after such a long time at the bottom of the ocean that the integrity of this structure would be a little shaky. It would be riddled with gaping holes. Also the hull would likely be isolated in separate walled off sections to prevent it sinking. So it would take multiple entry points to pump the ping pongs at the same time otherwise you risk only one end rising. This may work on a small boat that is still intact however using this method to raise a rusted old freighter would be virtually impossible.

Now pass this post on to 10 people or 300 kittens will be drowned.….…… by me!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Dan Kerr, Humour, Logic, Science, Skeptic. 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.