Is this true??

ChristopherM3 · #1 05-13-2006, 06:17 PM

I received this in e-mail today...........I've never heard anything like this & I don't have the time to look up anything on it........I know you guys would like to see it too..............just wondering if this could really be true...................

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Water Bridge - Over a River........

6 years, 500 million Euros,918 meters long.....now this is engineering.
This is a channel bridge over the River Elbe and joins the former East & West Germany as part of the unification project. It is located in the city of Magdeburg, near Berlin. The photo was taken on the day of inauguration.

To those who appreciate engineering projects, here is a puzzle for you armchair engineers & physicists. Did the bridge have to be designed to withstand the additional weight of ship & barge traffic, or just the weight of the water?

ANSWER: It only needs to be designed to withstand the weight of the water. Why? A ship always displaces an amount of water that weighs the smae as the ship, regardless of how heavily a ship may be loaded. Remember your high school physics and the fly in the enclosed bottle project? Similarly, the super sensitive scale proved that it didn't make any difference whether the fly was sitting on the bottom, walking up the side, or flying around. The bottle, air & fly are a single unit of mass & always weighed the same.

DINANM3 · #2 05-13-2006, 06:20 PM

If thats not true its the best damn photoshop job ive ever seen. Where is that? Its gotta be like norway or sweden they always got weird stuff like that there

NOC · #3 05-13-2006, 06:27 PM

I beleive it is a photoshop job, because you can not tell the depth of the bridge through the water and by looking at the columns on the side, it appears to be too shallow to hold all those boats. There is also an uneven drop towards the top of the pic, where the bridge keeps going. I could be wrong though, any info where this pic was taken??

ChristopherM3 · #4 05-13-2006, 06:31 PM

I think it's probably a photoshop too, but I thought it was an interesting concept..........

JCL · #5 05-13-2006, 07:04 PM

Oh, ye of little faith.

Basic engineering. Got to learn to trust the engineers

(Oh, and canal boats are very shallow draft vessels)

Dillinger's site (they did the steelwork):

http://www.dillinger.de/dh/referenze...index.shtml.en

Lots of canals in the UK are carried by bridges (aquaducts) across gaps, rivers, or what have you. This link shows the Llangollen canal in Shropshire.

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/jim.shead/P08728.html

A neat engineering project linking two canals with a form of elevator is shown here:

http://www.thefalkirkwheel.co.uk/index.asp?tm=3 (click on the link to Engineering to see a schematic of how it works)

Jeff