Dominoes are black and white rectangles that you can stack on one another, then knock down. There are many games you can play with them, from simple ones like laying down a line of them before knocking them over to complex ones, such as predicting where a domino will land when you roll two dice. Some people also use them to make art and architecture. In 2009, Stephen Morris set up a series of 13 dominoes, each about 1.5 times the size of the previous one. The first tiny domino took only a tweezer to set up, while the last was about a meter tall and weighed 100 pounds. He used a similar process to create a domino chain that is the longest in the world, and he also talked about how little energy is needed to start such a huge sequence of dominoes.
In the most basic game, each player in turn lays down a domino according to the rules of the game being played. If a player cannot lay down a domino, they must draw from the stock (also called the boneyard) until they have a tile with matching values to the one that has just been played. In some games, the person who makes the first play of a domino is called “the set,” “the down” or “the lead.”
The value of a domino is determined by its number of spots or pips, and may be referred to as its rank or weight. A domino usually has a line in the center to divide it visually into two squares, called ends. Each end has a specific value, from six pips down to none or blank. The most common dominoes are made of polymer materials, such as plastic or wood-based clay, but some sets have been made out of natural materials including silver lip ocean pearl oyster shell (mother of pearl), bone, ivory, ebony and other dark hardwoods, marble, granite, soapstone, metal, or ceramic clay. Natural-material dominoes are often heavier than polymer-based ones.
A typical domino set consists of 28 tiles, and each player draws seven of them from the stock, which is shuffled face down and formed into the boneyard or “domino river” in front of them. The resulting dominoes are placed on-edge, so players can see their own but not the values of their opponents’ tiles. Some people prefer to use traditional European-style dominoes, while others favor more novel materials and designs.
As the first domino falls, much of its potential energy converts to kinetic energy, which is the energy of motion. Some of this energy is transferred to the next domino, which gives it a small push and causes it to fall. This process continues, passing energy from one domino to the next until the last domino falls. This is the basic principle behind every domino effect, big or small. When Hevesh builds one of her mind-blowing domino setups, she follows a sort of engineering-design process, which is also what she uses to predict the outcome of an experiment.