From: Stephen Riley Subject: Re: Packing Density of Bricks Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 10:52:33 +0000 Newsgroups: sci.physics,sci.math Summary: [missing] In article <8b88dk$m0q$1@news.panix.com>, Edward Green writes >Suppose I have a dump truck full of bricks, which I dump into a random >heap. What is the packing density of the resulting pile? How might I >intelligently estimate such a thing? Of course the packing density will be maximum if the bricks fall into an ordered heap, i.e. packed tight as they might have been packed on the truck. Obvious, but not mentioned. So that's the maximum, although unlikely under the scenario you may in mind if the bricks are disordered on the truck to start with. And of course the probability of an ordered heap gets less likely as the drop height is increased, since the bricks could be spread flat over a huge area if dropped from enough height. But I'd have thought, coming back to what you meant in the problem, that the estimated packing density resulting from various drops, from a fixed height, could be given by statistical methods. That is, it forms a pyramid whose packing density, from various trials, follows a normal distribution. So I'd say it should be easy to estimate from experiment or by rough guessing, but I do not know about the difficulty of doing it by direct calculation either. I hesitate to say it sounds estimable mathematically, but I'll take the word of a mathematician on this. -- Stephen Riley