A domino can knock over another domino up to 1.5 times its size. Starting with a 5mm domino, the 29th domino in the chain would be tall enough to knock over the Empire State Building.
How 29 Dominoes Could Topple the Empire State Building
Here's a physics trick that sounds like pure fantasy: take a domino the size of your fingernail, and within 29 steps, you could theoretically knock over a skyscraper. No explosives. No wrecking ball. Just dominoes getting progressively bigger.
The secret is exponential growth—the same mathematical principle behind compound interest and viral videos. Each domino transfers enough energy to topple something 1.5 times its own height. Do that 29 times, and you've gone from millimeters to hundreds of meters.
The Math Behind the Mayhem
Physicist Lorne Whitehead first demonstrated this principle in 1983 in the American Journal of Physics. He proved that a domino can knock over another domino roughly 1.5 times taller because of how potential energy converts to kinetic energy during the fall.
Let's run the numbers:
- Domino 1: 5mm tall (smaller than a Tic Tac)
- Domino 10: About 19cm (a coffee mug)
- Domino 18: About 8 meters (a two-story house)
- Domino 23: About 60 meters (Leaning Tower of Pisa)
- Domino 29: About 415 meters (taller than the Empire State Building's roof)
The Empire State Building stands at 381 meters to the roof, 443 meters to the antenna tip. Either way, domino 29 has it covered.
Why This Actually Works
When a domino falls, it converts gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy. A falling domino delivers more force than needed to simply tip over its successor—it delivers enough to tip something significantly larger.
Think of it like a snowball rolling downhill, except instead of gathering snow, each "snowball" triggers a bigger one waiting nearby. The energy amplifies at each step.
In 2009, a team in the Netherlands built a real-world demonstration with 13 dominoes, starting at 5 centimeters and ending with a domino over a meter tall weighing 100 pounds. Each one fell with increasingly dramatic force, proving Whitehead's calculations weren't just theoretical.
The Catch
Could you actually build 29 dominoes and flatten a New York landmark? In theory, yes. In practice, you'd face some obstacles:
- Domino 25 would weigh around 6 million pounds
- You'd need specialized cranes and reinforced foundations
- Manhattan zoning laws might object
But the physics holds. The energy multiplication is real. And it all starts with something you could lose in your pocket lint.
This is what makes exponential growth so counterintuitive—and so powerful. Our brains evolved to think linearly. We expect 29 steps to get us 29 times further. Instead, those 29 steps take us from invisible to impossible.