Comments on: Can Young Kirk Really Survive the Car Jump In the New Star Trek?

By: guy

guy — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:41:27 +0000

@ S.
If you cant contribute.STFU.

By: the.manhattan.project

the.manhattan.project — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 03:27:27 +0000

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.

By: S.

S. — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 01:59:15 +0000

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.

By: Will

Will — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 02:41:13 +0000

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.