Resumen de Listen! A Smartphone Inquiry on the Domino Effect

Laurent Dalla Pola, Luis Darmendrail, Edward Galantay, Andreas Müller

• In this work, we investigate the phenomenon of a chain of falling dominoes (“domino effect”) by an acoustical measurement with a smartphone. Specifically, we will present an approximate model valid for a considerable range of realistic parameters of the domino effect; a new, easy, and low-cost experimental method using acoustical data captured by smartphones; and a comparison of these experimental data to the simplified treatment and to other, more comprehensive theories. The results of the experiments show good agreement with other measurements and theory, both advanced ones from the literature and our own simplified treatment: qualitatively, the approach to a constant propagation velocity of the domino front after a small number of toppled dominoes as predicted by theory; quantitatively, the numerical value of the asymptotic propagation velocity.