[MadMax]

You idea wasn't dumb. It just wasn't experienced.

You'd have hooked up your apparatus and realized that something wasn't working right. If you carefully thought it through after seeing the practical issues, you might have come to similar conclusions. I just have the luxury of taken a lot of wild stabs at mechanical problems so I can speak from a high ground of having learned from more mistakes than most.

Some principles can be easily taught and demonstrated in class. All the wierd stuff and complicated effects are actually mostly class room principles which are compounded in unexpected ways. Because they're unexpected, you don't bother to calculate for them and they kick you in the face when you make a practical model.

For instance, in Gr. 12 physics, you can calculation the acceleration of an object down a ramp. If you're good with HS calculus you can also determine the position the object would be at any given time.

In real life, if you rolled a solid sphere, a disc, and a tube down the ramp, you'd realize that they all accelerated differently despite your simpler calculations. In HS, you didn't realize that energy is also stored in rotation so the object with more mass concentrated at it's centre accelerated linearly faster because less potential energy was converted to rotational kinetic energy spinning it. The calculation to determine rotational energy is not difficult. It's actually similar to the 1/2mv^2 for linear energy. You just substitute m for a rotational inertia number (defined by the objects mass distribution) and v is substituted for the rotation rate in radians/sec.

With the circumfrence of the object, you can relate linear and rotational velocity to get rid of one of the variables and replug your equations back in HS math again.

Sounds complicated, but it's just an extension of the basic principles.