the.com/domino effect
One small push, and reality files the rest under inevitable.
means A situation where one small event triggers a chain of similar events, each one causing the next.
from Lifted straight from the parlor game: stand dominoes on end in a row, tip the first one, and physics does the rest. The phrase itself got its big break in Cold War politics — a mid-20th-century US president used it to argue that if one country fell to communism, neighboring countries would topple in sequence, just like the tiles. The political theory aged poorly, but the image was too good to retire, and it tipped over into everyday language for any chain reaction, political or not.
- origin
- cold war domino theory, politics first, physics later
- physics fact
- a domino can topple one 1.5 times its size
- chain math
- toppled dominoes release way more energy than pushed
- real demo
- 13 dominoes can fell one the size of a building