Can Young Kirk Really Survive the Car Jump In the New Star Trek?
PopSci’s Adam Weiner did some calculations to see if young Kirk could survive the car jump in the new Star Trek trailer. Adam’s wrong. We have the real answer in our own video.
According to Adam, he would have needed to apply a force of 3,900 Newtons with his fingers to stop from falling. His calculations, however, don’t take into account the friction of his body, as some of the comments in his article point out. But then again, he gave Kirk a 4m/s liftoff speed on his jump–which is quite high.
In any case, we stand by our answer: Who gives a vulcan arse about this. [PopSci]
The song is “Dead” by the Pixies, from the album “Pixies at the BBC”. Go get it. It rocks.
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
I think that the jumping estimate of 4m/s is too low, given that gravity is 9.8m/s^2. Standing still, the force acting downwards on a person is “g” which is 9.8m/s^2. To produce an acceleration of 4m/s at roughly t=.5s, a person would have to jump with approx. enough acceleration to cause 1g of acceleration in the opposite direction to earth’s gravity. +1g isn’t really that much and I’d venture a guess a person could generate more g’s then that by jumping.
There’s an easy way to test this out if you have an iPhone or other device with an accelerometer. Simply strap it to your body, jump and measure the amount of g’s you produce. I havn’t done this, but I’d venture you could probably create 2-3 g’s, meaning at t=.5 your velocity would be nearer 12m/s instead of 4. This seems reasonable given that humans can run at 12m/s, and that humans can handle 10g’s reasonably well.
I’ve a better puzzle, what is the probability of a person attempting to prove a Star Trek physics question having sex sometime in the next millenium?
Answer: Zero.
He clearly isn’t travelling at 32m/s when he reaches the cliff. When the video shows the car to be 30 m from the cliff, we then get a 1 second clip of the car travelling towards it, yet the car doesn’t fly off the edge. He only travels 1/3rd of the distance towards the cliff in this time, i.e. ~10 m/s. Thus he reduces his velocity to 6 m/s and the braking force required to a much more believable ~830 N.
@ S.
If you cant contribute.STFU.