How Many People Would it Take to Push the Trump Tower into the Chicago River?

A Facebook event planned a few weeks back suggested thousands of Bernie Sanders supporters get together to push the Trump Tower into the Chicago River. It was obviously a joke, but a Northwestern University physicist took the idea a step further to show how many people would need to show up for it to actually happen.

Dr. Arthur Schmidt, director of the undergraduate laboratory at Northwestern, told North by Northwestern - the University’s daily newsmagazine - that the Trump Tower would fall into the river if a six-foot wide concrete core was knocked down.

There’s a lot of science involved, including how much force concrete can withstand, how many newtons would be needed and ultimately the determination that 14 billion pounds of force would be needed to pull it off.

Assuming the average person weighs 160 pounds, 90 million people would need to show up. But then you’d need a wall of about 800,000 meters to fit everyone.

So it won’t happen. Unless Trump builds that wall, too.