Physics Doesn't Make Sense
After a missile exploded near my home, everyone said the same thing. It didn’t matter if you were a religious zealot or a science nerd, the reaction was the same. I heard it in five languages: physics doesn’t make sense.
In my apartment, every piece of exposed glass and ceramic shattered. Cups, vases, bowls, all gone. I walked in to what it actually looks like after a bomb explodes in your living room, stuff thrown everywhere. My reaction was to shout, “Oh no! My French Press!”
But my television? Totally fine.
I know, I know. You’re thinking “stronger glass.” We make excuses to pretend we understand how the world works. But my perfectly fine TV was just the first absurdity in a chain of them.
My friend—we’ll call him U—lived as close to the blast as it gets. His apartment took a direct hit from the shockwave and then got flooded by a broken fire hydrant. What luck! The kitchen appliances looked like they'd been pelted by golf balls and bean bag rounds. His TV was destroyed. Everything breakable broke… except, somehow, his PlayStation 5.
Apparently, PS5s are built like Motorola phones.
His gaming laptop he devoted years to did not survive. "Press F to pay respects."
In the aftermath of the explosion, U became fixated with his dresser. The bottom half of it was still in the living room, of course wrecked like the rest of his home. But the entire top half, along with everything inside, disappeared. Not exploded into fragments, not burned or crushed. It vanished. It’s been a month. There were multiple rounds of cleanup by him, good friends, neighbors, volunteers and city crews, but remnants of it still haven't turned up. U joked that it must have gone through a portal. I can’t offer a better explanation.
We Israelis don’t like to reveal too much info on the impact sites, and we don’t air our trauma online for sympathy. But it’s been a month, so I can give some insider info: The missile hit the corner of an outdoor parking lot on the ground floor. There was a crater at first. Emergency crews quickly covered it and buried the evidence. Without footage of the actual impact, people assumed it had struck one of the buildings. They pointed confidently to various walls, “Wow! You can see exactly where it hit this building!” They’re wrong.
It’s not great having your schuna (neighborhood) become a place for influencers and passersby to film IG and TikTok content. Certainly it’s not the ex-residents doing it. But it is funny to listen to them get so many details wrong, with such confidence. There’s a piece of the puzzle they’re missing: Physics doesn’t make sense.
The damage map makes no sense unless you accept that physics doesn’t behave the way people expect. The one tall tower in our neighborhood showed some expected physics properties. The upper floors were torn apart. But some assumed that the impact was mid-air. If only! That would explain so much.
I saw videos you haven’t, so I know that the unusual is the real case. I know it’s not what people think.
The ground floor, which you’d expect to be hit hardest, was mostly fine. In fact, the parking lot where the impact was looked as if it had an industrial cleaning. The impact cite was covered. You could probably rollerblade on it, but you couldn’t have before the impact.
So people pass by with their heads tilted upward, scanning the rooftops like they expect to see Superman. This is one phenomena is easily explained: missile shockwaves travel upward. High floors took on damage, even though the impact as on the ground.
Farther from the epicenter, things get harder to explain. In my building, some windows had exploded inward while others burst outward. My neighbor’s toilet exploded and flooded his home. His apartments should have been shielded by another apartment, which was barely touched. Even the inspectors were baffled.
Science has some answers, if you’re well-read. Shockwaves don’t move in a neat circle. They reflect off surfaces and refract through gaps, bouncing and folding in strange directions. These pressure patterns create localized destruction in spots that feel random. There’s also something called the blast shadow effect, where solid objects block the wave and protect what’s behind them. But even that doesn’t behave consistently. So a shielded structure can get flattened, while an exposed one is relatively unscathed.
One window in my apartment was spared because the tiny clasps gave way and let it swing open. All the other windows shattered. I’d expect non-exposed plastic to not break before glass. At least I would, before I learned physics doesn’t make sense.
Materials matter. Anchoring matters. Resonance and vibration matter. I live in a 100-year-old building that shakes from regular construction noise. If someone nails a painting in their apartment, their neighbor’s roof sprinkles dust. Yet my building holds. Meanwhile, thirty-year-old buildings nearby were totaled. In the words of an Argentine TV show (The Eternauts) on Netflix, “Old things work.” I can say there was more concrete or the wave chose another path. Or just accept it.
I like science. I believe in it. I’ve spent years arguing against easy answers. But if you ever find yourself wandering through the aftermath of a missile strike, glass everywhere, surrounded by contradictions, missing furniture, endless broken assumptions, you will join me in saying the same thing everyone else did: physics makes no sense. It just doesn’t. And honestly, it’s comforting to accept contradictions.
