There are no end to urban myths, and so naturally there is one about pennies: <\/p>\n
‘A tourist tossed a penny from the top of the Empire State Building to make a wish, and killed someone on the sidewalk below.’<\/p>\n
This article<\/a> explains why such a small object can’t kill you. (Note the inaccuracy – the article says a penny weighs a gram, when it’s actually 2.5 grams, but the basic science follows here.)<\/p>\n There is a scientific basis for the urban myth, though. Recently I read of the New Horizons flight<\/a> to Pluto: “When traveling at 31,000 miles per hour, a space rock as small as a grain of rice could destroy the spacecraft.”<\/p>\n And bullets, of course, are a similar phenomenon. They don’t weigh much; it’s their speed and shape, not their size, that makes them lethal.<\/p>\n We can kill with a glance, kill with knives, kill with poison gas. But not with a penny – unless it’s shot from a gun.<\/p>\n I picked this penny from 2000 because it looks like it has been through at least two lethal attacks. Whenever I see these beat-up pennies from 2000 and 2001, I think of what they looked like before the towers fell on 9\/11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are no end to urban myths, and so naturally there is one about pennies: ‘A tourist tossed a penny from the top of the Empire State Building to make a wish, and killed someone on the sidewalk below.’ This article explains why such a small object can’t kill you. (Note the inaccuracy – the article … read more Day 22: A penny from the Empire State Building<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5061,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[84,39,54,40,41],"class_list":["post-4518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pennies","tag-84","tag-hazard","tag-measurements","tag-myth","tag-weight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4518"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5059,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4518\/revisions\/5059"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}