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Showing posts from February, 2017

The Forces of Life

I was rewatching the second Matrix movie a while ago and got to that really pumped-up car chase - you know, the one with the truck that smashes into all the cars and all the Michael Bay-esque explosions? I remember watching and wondering why the car looked like it had recently been attacked by chainsaw-wielding lunatics while the truck barely had a scratched-up paintjob. A couple of years later - because I'm really not that big of a fan of the Matrix series, the last time I watched it, I was around 12 - I learned about the forces that occur in a car crash. It turns out that both the car and the truck experience the same amount of force, but the car is lighter, so it moves further. The force exerted by a vehicle in a car crash is influenced by two things - the mass of the vehicle and its speed at the time of the crash. The car weighs around 1300 kg while the truck weighs nearer 13,000 kg, but they both experience the same amount of force - doesn't make much sense, does it? We