Have you ever worried that, at any moment, you could be struck dead by a penny flung off the roof of a nearby skyscraper? You can rest easy - on that score, at least. In fact, it's extremely difficult to turn a penny into a lethal weapon, and hurling it over the barricades at the top of the Empire State Building won't get the job done. Even from that height, a penny is too small and flat, and cushioned by too much air, to become a torpedo.
Instead, it would flutter to the ground, like a leaf. If it did strike you, it would feel like being flicked in the forehead — "but not even very hard," said Louis Bloomfield, a physicist at the University of Virginia. And he should know. He recently used wind tunnels and helium balloons to replicate the fall of pennies from skyscrapers. When experimental pennies struck him, it didn't hurt. "I think one bounced off my face once," Bloomfield told Life's Little Mysteries.
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