Don’t Pull Down Statues. But If You DO, Use Physics.
I like Star Wars, so I will imagine different situations that could happen. Consider the time after Return of the Jedi. The Rebel Alliance had just destroyed the second Death Star and vanquished Emperor Palpatine along with it. After that, the New Republic was established.
What if the New Republic built a new star cruiser and named it the Palpatine? That would be sort of weird, right? I mean, Palpatine was the enemy of the New Republic. Why would you name it after him? Well, you see where I’m going now. Right?
Jump forward to modern day (remember, Star Wars was a long time ago). We have a real life similar situation with statues of Confederate soldiers. For instance, there was a statue of Jefferson Davis that was pulled down by protestors in Richmond, VA. Oh, in case you don’t remember Jefferson Davis was the president of the Confederacy — so, he’s clearly not a USA hero.
Enough about that, let’s talk about some physics. So, what’s the best way to pull down a statue? To answer this question, we really need to first go into torque and equilibrium. I’ll start with torque.
Torque
Let me be clear. Torque is pretty complicated. It’s inherently a 3 dimensional thing that mostly deals with 3 dimensional objects. It’s just what it is.
