Toppling glasses

[laurence44]

Falling Glasses

When a wine glass topples over is it more likely to break if it topples onto granite than onto wood?

Consider an empty stemmed glass stationary at its toppling point. It falls and accelerates as it rotates, and then hits the surface on which it stands.

Elementary mechanics can only describe completely the collision of two bodies if a Coefficient of Restitution is invoked, and this is a property of the colliding bodies. Intuition suggests different table-top materials destroy different numbers of tipped glasses; what does science suggest?

[mjd]

If a glass toppled over on two different surfaces it would be more likely to break on the harder one, which would absorb less kinetic energy from the glass.

[heathfield]

Science suggests that the COR is dependent upon the elasticity of a material, and the greater the elasticity of the table surface, the less likely it is that your glass will break.

[wildwood]

Our wine glasses won't break, they just bounce :-(