Re: [VictorSuvorov] Cliff jump (into water) question
In reply to:
To get really technical, what is relevant here is the "power" of an impact [..]
Can you support that with a reference of some sort? My understanding has always been that in hard collisions, kinetic energy at impact is the relevant factor, while force is important for more extended collisions.
The rationale goes as follows... As a warning, anybody with no interest in discussing the "why" of that should stop reading now. The below will almost certainly not make you a better jumper.
There is a certain minimum amount of energy involved in, say, breaking a particular bone. Undoubtedly, one can expend more than that to do the same damage less efficiently, but there some way which takes the least energy, and that minimum is not zero.
For more extended impacts (a proper dive, or a bungee jump, as opposed to landing in a seated position), a lot of mechanical energy is lost to heat, and it's more useful to talk about the force applied to a part of the body (though the above argument still holds).
Either way, a certain amount of energy is if one wants to break the bonds that keep the bone/spleen/ass cheeks together. You can apply half that amount as quickly, or as cleverly, as you like, making the power arbitrarily high, and it .
Could be we're basically talking semantics here. It's not clear to me that one could manipulate force and power independently, so that it may be possible to use either in the case of an extended impact.
