the behaviour of the computer model paralleled that of the randomised batches of
eggs that had been dropped on to cage floors by Anderson et al. (1970); in particular,
the model agreed with experiment that a very important factor is the effective mass
of the cage floor, i.e. the mass of that small part of the floor in the near neighbourhood
of the point of impact that has to be accelerated by the egg immediately after
impact. In some respects, however, the behaviour of the model did not parallel
that of eggs; for example, when the effective mass of the floor was about 2 g the
model predicted an important effect of egg mass on force at impact, whereas doubling
egg mass experimentally had no apparent effect on the incidence of shell cracking.
One important thing that the model did, and experiment had not done, was to
draw attention to the role of the stiffness of the cage floor, as distinct from its effective
mass.