Ok. Thanks for all your responses, they have been helpful, but are not quite getting at what I was asking.
I'm not interested in ice racing, nor the real coefficient of friction on ice. I also know that rolling resistance is very small for a car compared to air drag. I'm attempting to get at...
suppose we have a car on ice stuck in first gear.
intuitively, I thought it should still be able attain maximum speed (in first gear) in a straight line, but it would take longer because it couldn't apply as much force before the force it applies is greater than the static friction between...
hello there. this is as much a comp sci question as a physics question, however the comp sci board looked more like a 'computer technology' board, and didn't have much stuff relevant to physics. even though I'm trying to optimize an algorithm for a very specific need, it requires knowledge of...
OK.
my issue is then what limits top speed? I do not thing for a runner it is simply torque. I thought about it like this: a human on a bicycle with one-to-one gearing can go much faster than a human on foot, yet they have the same torque (and the bicycle even has the extra overhead of the...
What limits the acceleration of a runner? and how does this work?
my intuition is that it is primarily gravity. air resistance should have minimal influence. if this is the case, then it seems that humans (and most other legged animals) would reach their top speed almost immediately, since...