Physicist: I Came in Like a Wrecking Ball

(Image: Vevo/Discover)

Miley Cyrus earned a lot of money with her hit song "Wrecking Ball" and a lot of attention with her video for that song, which included nude scenes. David McDonagh, an undergraduate student at the University of Leicester, UK, watched her body intently. What are its physical properties? Would it withstand the forces involved in serving as a wrecking ball?

McDonagh concludes that Miley Cyrus would not live through the process. In an article that he published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics, McDonagh concludes that Cyrus would fail as a wrecking ball:

Based on these findings, it is clear that a human being cannot possess the characteristics of a wrecking ball without sustaining significant injury, and other objects should be sought as an analogy.

Kyle Hill of Discover magazine is a bit more blunt. Miley Cyrus would be dead:

Miley is nowhere near as heavy as an average wrecking ball, so to produce the same momentum, she would have to come in incredibly fast. Assuming she weighed 125 pounds**, she would have to come in like a wrecking ball at over 390 miles per hour to generate the same momentum.

And what happens when this Miley ball hits a wall? Assuming a rapid deceleration, Miley pulls 350 G’s impacting the wall with over 198,000 Newtons—a force equivalent to getting hit with all the force rocketed out of a 747 engine at once.

If Miley really did come in like a wrecking ball, she would never again hit so hard in love, because she’d be dead.