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1/

Get a cup of coffee.

In this thread, let's talk snowballs.

Snowballs are super fun! And they can teach us so much about life, about things that grow over time, their rates of growth, compounding, etc.


2/

Snowballs are often used as a metaphor for compounding.

A snowball starts small at the top of a hill. As it rolls downhill, it picks up speed and grows in size. This is like money compounding over time.

For example, here's Buffett's famous "snowball quote":


3/

There's even a famous book about Buffett with "snowball" in the title.

The book's theme is similar to the quote above: the process of compounding is like a snowball that grows over time as it rolls downhill.

Link:
https://t.co/L3opOrdeoZ


4/

Clearly, snowballs rolling downhill are worthy objects of study.

So let's dive into their physics!

Luckily for us, in 2019, Scott Rubin published a paper analyzing such snowballs -- in a journal called "The Physics Teacher".

All we need to do is understand this paper.


5/

We begin by identifying 2 kinds of quantities in our "snowball system":

1. "Parameters" that don't change with time (eg, the hill's angle of incline), and

2. "State Variables" that *do* change with time (eg, the snowball's radius and velocity).