A child fell from a 15th-floor balcony of this apartment building in Montgomery County, Maryland, and landed on a bush and survived, police said. Dan Morse / The Washington Post

Incredible. Amazing. Miraculous.

There have been many ways to describe a 2-year-old boy surviving a 15-story free fall off an outdoor balcony into a small bush last week in Montgomery County, Maryland. But any discussion quickly gives way to the question: How?

“The first thing to realize is that it’s not the fall, it’s the landing,” said Anette Hosoi, a physicist and mechanical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hosoi teaches fluid mechanics, which she said covers the mathematics needed to study how humans fall. For more than 10 years, she has made the “physics of falling” a su

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