You know, really, neither falling nor suddenly stopping is harmful. The thing that kills you is that half of you suddenly stops and the other half of you gradually stops.
Well put. And the way I can fit this into an information-theoretic formalism is that one part of the body has high kinetic energy relative to the other, which requires more information to store.
Yes, but the sudden stop is itself a (backwards) acceleration, which should be reproducible merely from a gravitational field.
(Anecdote: when I first got into aircraft interior monument analysis, I noticed that the crash conditions it’s required to withstand include a forward acceleration of 9g, corresponding to a head-on crash. I naively asked, “wait, in a crash, isn’t the aircraft accelerating backwards (aft)?” They explained that the criteria is written in the frame of reference of the objects on the aircraft, which are indeed accelerating forward relative to the aircraft.)
The sudden stop is a differential backwards acceleration. The front of the object gets hits and starts accelerating backwards while the back is not,
If you could stop something by applying a uniform 10000g to all parts of the object, it would survive none the worse for wear. If you can’t, and only apply it to part, the object gets smushed or ripped apart.
The classic pithy summary of this is “falling is harmless, it’s the sudden stop at the end that kills you.”
You know, really, neither falling nor suddenly stopping is harmful. The thing that kills you is that half of you suddenly stops and the other half of you gradually stops.
Well put. And the way I can fit this into an information-theoretic formalism is that one part of the body has high kinetic energy relative to the other, which requires more information to store.
Yes, but the sudden stop is itself a (backwards) acceleration, which should be reproducible merely from a gravitational field.
(Anecdote: when I first got into aircraft interior monument analysis, I noticed that the crash conditions it’s required to withstand include a forward acceleration of 9g, corresponding to a head-on crash. I naively asked, “wait, in a crash, isn’t the aircraft accelerating backwards (aft)?” They explained that the criteria is written in the frame of reference of the objects on the aircraft, which are indeed accelerating forward relative to the aircraft.)
The sudden stop is a differential backwards acceleration. The front of the object gets hits and starts accelerating backwards while the back is not,
If you could stop something by applying a uniform 10000g to all parts of the object, it would survive none the worse for wear. If you can’t, and only apply it to part, the object gets smushed or ripped apart.