Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello,
I made a Water Bottle Toss Carnival game for my Science Fair project. Can you help me figure out if I have three weighted water bottles that weight 862 grams each and are set up in a pyramid shape and the player throws a tennis ball that weights 58.5 grams and is thrown 3.7 meters away from where the weight water bottles are set up, how fast/hard or what amount of force is needed to successfully hit all three weighted bottles off of a milk crate?
Thanks
Kade

Hi Kade - this is a pretty advanced high school or even college-level physics problem to figure out mathematically. Since you posted in the 6th-8th grade forum I assume you are in middle school and have not taken high school physics yet. Honestly, the best way to do this would be to do an experiment where you can somehow control and measure the speed of the ball (like with a baseball or tennis ball pitching machine) and do a lot of trials to collect the data.

If you DID want to figure it out mathematically, you would need to learn about Newton's Laws of Motion and terms like momentum, impulse, torque, potential energy, and kinetic energy. All of that is way more physics than I can explain in a forum post - it takes months in a year-long physics class. So again, I recommend the experimental approach. Hope that helps.

Ben