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Would Noah's Ark have floated?

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  • Would Noah's Ark have floated?

    Yes, at least according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Physics Special Topics (a peer reviewed student journal put out by the University of Leicester) which declares that the Ark as described in Genesis 6:13-22 would have not only floated but would have supported the weight of 2.15 million sheep without sinking.

    I really would like to know exactly how they determined that there were only 35,000 species of animals at the time.
    Last edited by rogue06; 04-03-2014, 05:24 PM.

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  • #2
    Yay physics...
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    • #3
      I could have done without the fire ants
      The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
        I could have done without the fire ants
        They were part of the contract along with mosquitoes, termites and roaches. Had Noah been a little less awestruck, he might have thought to mention them before agreeing to the package deal...
        "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot

        "Forgiveness is the way of love." Gary Chapman

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        • #5
          The insects survived on their own... on floating logs?
          If it weren't for the Resurrection of Jesus, we'd all be in DEEP TROUBLE!

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          • #6
            The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by Christianbookworm View Post
              The insects survived on their own... on floating logs?
              Not unless they could hibernate - it was a very long time between the rain starting and dry land reappearing. Floating on a barren log only keeps you sorta dry - won't provide food, not even for termites.
              "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot

              "Forgiveness is the way of love." Gary Chapman

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
                Riiiiight... Who is this really?
                "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot

                "Forgiveness is the way of love." Gary Chapman

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Teallaura View Post
                  Not unless they could hibernate - it was a very long time between the rain starting and dry land reappearing. Floating on a barren log only keeps you sorta dry - won't provide food, not even for termites.
                  Nasty little stowaways....
                  If it weren't for the Resurrection of Jesus, we'd all be in DEEP TROUBLE!

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
                    Yes, at least according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Physics Special Topics (a peer reviewed student journal put out by the University of Leicester) which declares that the Ark as described in Genesis 6:13-22 would have not only floated but would have supported the weight of 2.15 million sheep without sinking.

                    I really would like to know exactly how they determined that there were only 35,000 species of animals at the time.
                    Huh. Interesting.
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                    • #11
                      Well, most animals are about as dense as water, so that doesn't surprise me too much. Plus, most wood is less dense than water.

                      Calculating the volume is harder: if I Google "volume of one sheep" I get a bunch of results for the TV show Baa Baa Black Sheep.
                      Find my speling strange? I'm trying this out: Simplified Speling. Feel free to join me.

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                      • #12
                        Use crates for animal volumes. I found a sheep crate with the following dimensions: 4 feet wide, 5 feet long, and 3 foot 4 inches high.
                        "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot

                        "Forgiveness is the way of love." Gary Chapman

                        My Personal Blog

                        My Novella blog (Current Novella Begins on 7/25/14)

                        Quill Sword

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                        • #13
                          Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
                          Yes, at least according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Physics Special Topics (a peer reviewed student journal put out by the University of Leicester) which declares that the Ark as described in Genesis 6:13-22 would have not only floated but would have supported the weight of 2.15 million sheep without sinking.

                          I really would like to know exactly how they determined that there were only 35,000 species of animals at the time.
                          I do not think the design of the Ark as presented is a viable sea worthy vessel. It may float briefly, but then surely implode, crumble and sink, because of it shear size, and instability of wooden ships this large.

                          Source: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4279

                          Would it have been possible to find enough material to build Noah's Ark? When another early supership was built, the Great Michael (completed in Scotland in 1511) it was said to have consumed "all the woods of Fife". Fife was a county in Scotland famous for its shipbuilding. The Great Michael's timber had to be purchased and imported not only from other parts of Scotland, but also from France, the Baltic Sea, and from a large number of cargo ships from Norway. Yet at 73 meters, she was only about half the length of Noah's Ark. Clearly a ship twice the length of the Great Michael, and larger in all other dimensions, would have required many times as much timber. It's never been clearly stated exactly where Noah's Ark is said to have been built, but it would have been somewhere in Mesopotamia, probably along either the Tigris or Euphrates rivers. This area is now Iraq, which has never been known for its abundance of shipbuilding timber.


                          In 2003, a doctoral candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Jose Solis, created a proposal to build the Ark for Noah based on sound naval architecture. He proposed a dead weight — the weight of the wooden structure alone minus cargo and ballast — as 3,676 tons. Fully loaded, it would have displaced 13,000 tons, as compared to the Great Michael's 1,000 that consumed "all the wood of Fife". Where would all that wood have come from? In his proposal, Solis simply skipped this detail, and assumed the wood was commercially available at a cost of $16,472,040 in 2003 dollars. Tens of thousands of massive timber-quality trees would have to have been imported into the middle of what's now Iraq. Did Noah have the resources to import from France, Norway, or anywhere else?

                          But if the Ark did get built, it would be necessary to overcome its extraordinary fragility. If you pick up a toy Hot Wheels car, you can squeeze it as hard as you want but you can't break it. However, if you were a giant and reached down to pick up a normal passenger car, your fingers would crush it before creating sufficient friction to lift it. If you even lifted it by one corner, you would warp its structure noticeably. When we extend this to even larger vessels, their fragility is magnified. Recall that when the Titanic sank, that massive steel structure tore completely in half simply because one end was heavier than the other. Just that difference in weight was sufficient to tear open many decks of reinforced steel that had been engineered to the day's toughest standards. Were Titanic a wooden box instead of rigid steel, you (as a giant) could destroy it just by swishing your finger in the water next to it.

                          Allow me to explain. What's known as the square-cube law is pretty familiar: increase an object's dimensions, and its surface area increases by the square of the multiplier, and its weight increases by the cube of the multiplier. But one extension of this law is less familiar. When we scale up an object — take a wooden structural beam as an example — the strength of the beam does not increase as fast as its weight. Applied mechanics and material sciences give us all the tools we need to compute this. In summary, the tensile strength of a beam is a function of its moment and its section modulus. No need to go into the complicated details here — you can look up beam theory on Wikipedia if you want to learn the equations. Scale up a simple wooden beam large enough, the weight will exceed its strength, and it will break from its own weight alone. Scaled up to the immense size of Noah's Ark, a stout wooden box would be unspeakably fragile.

                          If there was even the gentlest of currents, sufficient pressure would be put on the hull to open its seams. Currents are not a complete, perfectly even flow. They consist of eddies and slow-moving turbulence. This puts uneven pressure on the hull, and Noah's Ark would bend with those eddies like a snake. Even if the water itself was perfectly still, wind would expose the flat-sided Ark's tremendous windage, exerting a shearing force that might well crumple it.

                          © Copyright Original Source

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                          Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
                          But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

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                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Teallaura View Post
                            Riiiiight... Who is this really?
                            I was going to post this video in the thread on the Noah movie but was afraid someone would burn me at the stake.
                            βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι᾿ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, τότε δὲ πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον·
                            ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους, τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼς καὶ ἐπεγνώσθην.

                            אָכֵ֕ן אַתָּ֖ה אֵ֣ל מִסְתַּתֵּ֑ר אֱלֹהֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל מוֹשִֽׁיעַ׃

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by shunyadragon View Post
                              I do not think the design of the Ark as presented is a viable sea worthy vessel. It may float briefly, but then surely implode, crumble and sink, because of it shear size, and instability of wooden ships this large.

                              Source: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4279

                              Would it have been possible to find enough material to build Noah's Ark? When another early supership was built, the Great Michael (completed in Scotland in 1511) it was said to have consumed "all the woods of Fife". Fife was a county in Scotland famous for its shipbuilding. The Great Michael's timber had to be purchased and imported not only from other parts of Scotland, but also from France, the Baltic Sea, and from a large number of cargo ships from Norway. Yet at 73 meters, she was only about half the length of Noah's Ark. Clearly a ship twice the length of the Great Michael, and larger in all other dimensions, would have required many times as much timber. It's never been clearly stated exactly where Noah's Ark is said to have been built, but it would have been somewhere in Mesopotamia, probably along either the Tigris or Euphrates rivers. This area is now Iraq, which has never been known for its abundance of shipbuilding timber.


                              In 2003, a doctoral candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Jose Solis, created a proposal to build the Ark for Noah based on sound naval architecture. He proposed a dead weight — the weight of the wooden structure alone minus cargo and ballast — as 3,676 tons. Fully loaded, it would have displaced 13,000 tons, as compared to the Great Michael's 1,000 that consumed "all the wood of Fife". Where would all that wood have come from? In his proposal, Solis simply skipped this detail, and assumed the wood was commercially available at a cost of $16,472,040 in 2003 dollars. Tens of thousands of massive timber-quality trees would have to have been imported into the middle of what's now Iraq. Did Noah have the resources to import from France, Norway, or anywhere else?

                              But if the Ark did get built, it would be necessary to overcome its extraordinary fragility. If you pick up a toy Hot Wheels car, you can squeeze it as hard as you want but you can't break it. However, if you were a giant and reached down to pick up a normal passenger car, your fingers would crush it before creating sufficient friction to lift it. If you even lifted it by one corner, you would warp its structure noticeably. When we extend this to even larger vessels, their fragility is magnified. Recall that when the Titanic sank, that massive steel structure tore completely in half simply because one end was heavier than the other. Just that difference in weight was sufficient to tear open many decks of reinforced steel that had been engineered to the day's toughest standards. Were Titanic a wooden box instead of rigid steel, you (as a giant) could destroy it just by swishing your finger in the water next to it.

                              Allow me to explain. What's known as the square-cube law is pretty familiar: increase an object's dimensions, and its surface area increases by the square of the multiplier, and its weight increases by the cube of the multiplier. But one extension of this law is less familiar. When we scale up an object — take a wooden structural beam as an example — the strength of the beam does not increase as fast as its weight. Applied mechanics and material sciences give us all the tools we need to compute this. In summary, the tensile strength of a beam is a function of its moment and its section modulus. No need to go into the complicated details here — you can look up beam theory on Wikipedia if you want to learn the equations. Scale up a simple wooden beam large enough, the weight will exceed its strength, and it will break from its own weight alone. Scaled up to the immense size of Noah's Ark, a stout wooden box would be unspeakably fragile.

                              If there was even the gentlest of currents, sufficient pressure would be put on the hull to open its seams. Currents are not a complete, perfectly even flow. They consist of eddies and slow-moving turbulence. This puts uneven pressure on the hull, and Noah's Ark would bend with those eddies like a snake. Even if the water itself was perfectly still, wind would expose the flat-sided Ark's tremendous windage, exerting a shearing force that might well crumple it.

                              © Copyright Original Source

                              If you accept the story of Noah, then a necessary component would be believing in God and miracles. God could have kept the Ark afloat if it were built of rock.

                              Oh and the guy is wrong about cars too. We lift cars all the time just by using a magnet on the roof (at scrap yards), or using cranes and tow trucks without distorting them as he claims.



                              Last edited by Sparko; 04-07-2014, 05:40 PM.

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