Here’s a video clip that dramatically illustrates an interesting and counterintuitive fact: a small domino can knock over a domino up to 50% bigger than itself. This means that this knocking-over can very quickly “scale up”.



How is this possible? The first domino in this video can’t weigh more than a gram, while the last one weighs a hundred pounds. The answer is that the energy released is put into the system when you stand the dominos up, and because dominos are tall and thin, they are “tippy”. All that’s needed is for each domino to release enough energy to get the next domino’s center of gravity shifted far enough that it is no longer over the footprint of its base.

This is rich in metaphoric and isomorphic possibility. What else might be “tippy”?