Interesting Problem , let see who can come up with the soln.

Booooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

lol. Where did you learn physics?


You are in the train, you are in the object of reference. The air in the train moves with the train therefore it will not cause resistance on the coin when it drops and won't cause it to move backward. Furthermore, a person outside the referential would see the coin or you moving at the same speed at the train and would not see the coin moving backward either.

The only conclusion to this matter his: YOUR THREAD WAS USELESS !

 

Find an object that is located right on the horizon and count how long the object takes to reach you. So if you are in the train and seated, then you are about 8 feet off the ground or roughly 3 miles to the horizon. At 50 MPH then the object will take roughly 16 minutes to reach you.

This will not work if you are crossing a mountain. It is only good if you are on a flat plain and the object is no more than a foot tall.

PS: If all else fails, tell the old man that he needs to turn up his hearing aide because the engineer just announced the train's speed.

 

What's wrong with going up to the driver and asking him what speed the trains travelling at, or looking at the speedometer??

 

Cary an air flow speedometer with you and hold it out the window. Then do whatever mathamatical voodoo you need to do to convert its results into mph.

Or just google the question on your phone and see what smart people came up with

 

Do your own homework!