Horse Power · 12:53pm Aug 20th, 2016
From my perspective, Cart Before the Ponies gets the highest mark of any episode for grabbing the viewer’s attention during the opening.
...because today we're going to learn about physics!
Cheerilee clearly knows a few teaching tricks, such as how to exploit a popular sporting event to manipulate student interest into learning some vaguely relevant curriculum point, although it seems she hasn’t yet learned that covering a blackboard with incomprehensible hieroglyphs isn’t an effective approach.
Quite what a Minkowski light cone is doing on the bottom right is surely a starting point for an interesting fanfic, but probably not one I will find time to write. Maybe that bit was left over from a visit by Twilight and Starlight. Also curious that Cheerilee brings in a portable board, instead of cleaning the one on the wall behind her, which appears to been untouched since Season 1. I’ll take that as supporting evidence for the theory I advanced in Rainbooms and Rationality.
The lesson is a standard part of any school science syllabus on the conversion of different types of energy. How energy as light from the sun is converted into chemical energy stored in plants, which are eaten by ponies, and converted to kinetic energy as they run around and pull carts, and so on. But, if taken at face value, this episode gives us some important information on how to interpret the pony world. These carts are driven by physics, and not magic.
Conventional Soapbox Derby racing is powered by gravity. You start at the top of a hill, and roll down. There’s plenty of interesting physics in the details, as explained in The Physics of Soap Box Derby
“When the starting gate releases a car, it accelerates down the hill. While accelerating, the car’s Potential Energy (PE) is converted into Kinetic Energy (KE). The more efficiently PE is converted to KE, the faster the car goes.”
This is followed by a detailed, and mostly correct, discussion of how to how to build the most efficient racer, considering mass distribution, surface friction, aerodynamic forces, motion of inertia. There’s further information about physics applied to pinewood derby racing.
It would seem the racetrack in Ponyville has been cleverly designed to allow racers to build up sufficient momentum going down a steep hill to navigate a more uneven topography around the town centre. Of course, a perfectly feasible alternative explanation is that gravity works in different ways in Ponyville. We can also consider the possibility that the Ponyville rules are different and allow for the use of other forms of Potential Energy.
Have ponies invented the internal combustion engine? Or does the clean environment necessitate the use of zero-emission electric vehicles? Evidently having developed such technology, they would decide to reserve its use for annual fun and games (you wouldn’t want to put the delivery cart pullers out of a job). But as we are dealing with toy ponies, maybe we should think on a different scale. Small toy cars have been powered by a variable of different types of energy, including compressed air, and clockwork. I quite like the idea, that the pony carts just have a large elastic band wrapped tightly around the axle to provide the potential energy to let it go.
The biggest pity is that they drew the track so it looked as good as a politicians promise, and then with a second look, its about as realistic.
Cars going over a bridge that from the top shot has absolutly no connection anywhere to any of the track itself.
An elastic band, with hook or othe release method would be intresting as its a finite amount of energy and force that decays asthe vehicle gets going while giving full force from the start.
I wonder if anyone looked at using a differential and sliding gear, taken from the windmill gear train, to build an elastic band Kerbs? Slide one way to slow down for corners by stretching it then slide the other to release the energy back?
I was hoping you'd weigh in on this one. Given how the carts ostensibly had to be carved out of blocks of apple wood, the rubber band theory seems most feasible, rather than, say, internal combustion. Of course, if we could decipher the Voynich Manuscript-grade enigma that is Cheerilee's chalkboard, we too might be able to discover the secret to free energy.
Loved this part of the episode. Gotta say I wanted to give Snails a more tangible lesson in momentum transfer, though. As in punching him.
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Nopony ever said the carts were all staying on the track...