Passage Three

Is nothing sacred Even the idle weekend pastime of skimming stones on a lake has been taken apart and reduced to a mathematical formula. Everyone knows a stone bounces best on water if it’s round and flat, and spun towards the water as fast as possible. Some enthusiasts even travel to international stone-skimming competitions, like world champion Jerdone Coleman-McGhee, who made a stone bounce 38 times on Blanco River, Texas, in 1992. Intuitively,a flat stone works best because a relatively large part of its suce strikes the water, so there’s more bounce. Inspired by his eight-year-old son, physicist Lyderic Bocquet of Lyon University in France wanted to find out more. So he tinkered with some equations describing a stone bouncing on water in terms of its radius(半径) ,speed and spin, and taking account of gravity and the water’s drag. The equations showed that the faster a spinning stone is travelling, the more times it will bounce. So no surprise there. To bounce at least once without sinking, Bocquet found the stone needs to be travelling at a minimum speed of about 1 kilometre per hour. And the equations also backed his hunch(直觉) that spin is important because it keeps the stone fairly flat from one bounce to the next. The spin has a gyroscopic(陀螺的) effect, pring the stone from tipping and falling sideways into the water. To match the world record of 38 bounces using a 10-centimetre-wide stone, Bocquet predicts it would have to be travelling at about 40 kilometres per hour and spinning at 14 revolutions a second. He adds that drilling lots of small pits in the stone would probably help, by reducing water drag in the same way that dim pies on a golf ball reduce air drag. "Although I suppose that would be cheating," says Bocquet. He and his team at Lyon hope to design a motorized "catapult" that can throw stones onto a lake with a precise speed and spin, to test if the predictions stand up. Bocquet adds that he’s probably just rediscovering a piece of history. British engineer Barnes Wallis must have done the same sort of maths and experiments when he was designing his famous bouncing bombs for the Dambusters squadron(中队) during the Second World War.

Lyderic Bocquet drilled lots of small pits in the stone in order to ______.