What happens when you hold up a solid object and let it go? ...well it falls of coarse. How soon does it start falling? As soon as you release it... sort of. Radiolab and a few YouTube videos can explain and demonstrate what I'm hinting at a lot better than I can.
See, when you dangle the Slinky you make it so that the only way information can travel from top to bottom is through the coil. Because the path is so long you can see this delay of "knowledge" between what the top of the Slinky "knows" and what the bottom of the Slinky "knows".
This is a simple example of how matter can act as a wave. The Slinky is literally falling molecule by molecule. The molecules have small spaces between them, so it takes a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second for the first molecule to effect the next one. If you add up these each individually invisible delays you end up with one visible one.
Its the same sort of effect as shown by a whip or a pole vault. It occurs in all matter, not only flexible matter. So this means EVERYTHING occurs on some amount of delay. The longer the path the longer the delay, but even short delays can have a large effect.
F=ma
This might be taken to mean that any two items made of the same material, traveling at the same speed, hitting the same surface will have the same effect. This isn't the case. A ball bearing of mass m will not hit as hard as a metal rod of mass m that strikes on its end. Pretty cool.
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