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The film is Cool Hand Luke. Our hero is Paul Newman. The task is to undertake the most marvellously mad, mind numbingly pointless bet in movie history: to eat fifty eggs in one hour, without throwing up. But can it be done, or is it yet another case of Hollywood Science? Could you eat fifty eggs? Could anyone? Our backyard biologists Jonathan Hare and Robert Llewellyn are determined to find out. The first step, find out the amount of space the eggs would take up, then see if a person’s stomach can hold that much. So let’s use some simple calculations. If the radius of an egg is about 2.5cm and the volume of an ellipse is: volume of ellipse =  volume of 50 eggs =
 (where m is metres), fifty eggs will be approximately 0.003 metres cubed or 3 litres when chewed. Can the human stomach hold this many eggs? And what happens to the eggs as they pass through the digestive system?
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