Is a Karate (Martial Arts) Physics Project a good idea?

[somePhysicsMajorUCSB]

To put it simply, I am currently a Physics major at UCSB. I have a lot of engineering friends and I am currently spending the summer doing school to get ahead of the Physics program here. Yet I came to a bit of a realization, a lot of people within my University and outside of it are spending their summer in internships, jobs, research programs, school, and doing projects. I have already been working on an Arduino project, however I want to expand the amount of projects I am currently working on to develop my skills and have a stronger resume.

I have done martial arts for most my life, I achieved a black belt in American Kenpo. However upon studying the art I realized that some of the more theoretical side of American Kenpo to be incorrect. I definitely would enjoy researching this topic personally, however I was wondering if this would truly be a worthwhile as a Physics major who would like to eventually attend Graduate school for Physics.

I have not really found much information on the internet of a scientific view on the martial arts, I do think it would be a challenge, however I am not too sure if it would look good on a resume.

 

[jedishrfu]

I've seen some Discovery Channel-style stuff on the physics of martial arts but in my opinion, it was pretty poor and designed more for entertainment:

https://watch.plex.tv/show/fight-science/season/1

First, as a project, it could involve the use of cameras, impact sensors, and other equipment and will likely be very data intensive.

One example that I know of where a physics analysis on body mechanics was done is Sarah Hummel's MS thesis on the Frisbee and the body mechanics of throwing it:

https://morleyfielddgc.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/hummelthesis.pdf

You might find something in there that you can use in your project. Perhaps you can be more focused and analyze the various styles of kicks (or punches, blocks ...) showing the force aspects, speed, and body mechanics involved.

 

[jedishrfu]

An alternative project would be to study the methods of the long jump, high jump, discus throw, hammer throw or javelin throw. There are a lot of historical schemes that either revolutionized the sport or got banned.

In the case of the long jump, an athlete and his coach developed a somersault scheme that gave the athlete two more feet in the jump. However, the sports committee banned the scheme deeming it too dangerous.



and Bob Beamon's jump:



In the case of the javelin throw, one athlete had perfected a method that threw the javelin almost out of the field so the sports committee redesigned the javelin to be less aerodynamic until another athlete did something similar so it got redesigned yet again.

https://engineeringsport.co.uk/2012/09/21/the-story-of-the-javelin-bringing-it-back-down-to-earth/

In the case of the high jump, Dick Fosbury revolutionized the sport with his Fosbury flop.

 

[somePhysicsMajorUCSB]

This all very interesting, particularly that javelin example you mentioned. I will definitely take look into that. I’m definitely going to search for some other intriguing sports phenomena, yet my interests at the moment do lie in martial arts, that idea of looking into different styles has been in my mind for years. I appreciate the input.

 

[jedishrfu]

I presented the sports ones because I was fearful that the martial arts choice might lead you into a rabbit hole of too much stuff to look at unless you focus on a specific technique.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I have mixed feelings. One part of my brain is saying "study what you are interested in". The other is saying "this is a non-intuitive mess". The sticks-and-forces model of freshman physics works poorly. Everything is a spring. A damped spring. A non-linear damped spring. Coupled non-linear damped springs.

 

[Andy Resnick]

To put it simply, I am currently a Physics major at UCSB. I have a lot of engineering friends and I am currently spending the summer doing school to get ahead of the Physics program here. Yet I came to a bit of a realization, a lot of people within my University and outside of it are spending their summer in internships, jobs, research programs, school, and doing projects. I have already been working on an Arduino project, however I want to expand the amount of projects I am currently working on to develop my skills and have a stronger resume.

I have done martial arts for most my life, I achieved a black belt in American Kenpo. However upon studying the art I realized that some of the more theoretical side of American Kenpo to be incorrect. I definitely would enjoy researching this topic personally, however I was wondering if this would truly be a worthwhile as a Physics major who would like to eventually attend Graduate school for Physics.

I have not really found much information on the internet of a scientific view on the martial arts, I do think it would be a challenge, however I am not too sure if it would look good on a resume.

And undergrad student and I recently published a paper that you may find helpful (also, I'm happy to discuss with you):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8354461/

 

[somePhysicsMajorUCSB]

I have mixed feelings. One part of my brain is saying "study what you are interested in". The other is saying "this is a non-intuitive mess". The sticks-and-forces model of freshman physics works poorly. Everything is a spring. A damped spring. A non-linear damped spring. Coupled non-linear damped springs.

In that case, what level physics would you recommend for this task?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Since it's a problem involving many coupled, damped, nonlinear oscillators, you should be familiar with coupled, damped, nonlinear oscillators.

 

[pinball1970]

Since it's a problem involving many coupled, damped, nonlinear oscillators, you should be familiar with coupled, damped, nonlinear oscillators.

Yeah but he's a black belt. Its best to say that to his face so, as a pf member? I will be right behind you.
About 2000 miles behind you.

 

[jedishrfu]

It would be interesting to use a Lagrangian formulation to obviate the need for sticks and forces although coming up with one that mimics the system might be hard and solving it even harder.

The Hummel paper I mentioned earlier did some work on body mechanics using Matlab code so that would be worth studying.

But I think you'll need to focus on one technique to model and go through the experiments and modeling to see where you stand. I'm afraid you might get lost in the weeds.

I took a course in modeling systems and for my final project tried to model the Feynman Frisbie in Java using the Open Source physics. In the end, I got the code to run but wasn't happy with it. My professor gave me an A for effort I guess. (he didn't know Java as he had taught earlier versions of the course with an older BASIC-based OpenSource Physics framework)

In contrast, the other student in the class (we had four signups but two dropped out within the first week) did a handwavium project and he got an A for thinking about it. I don't remember what his was on.

We used the book:

https://www.amazon.com/Open-Source-Physics-Users-Examples/dp/080537759X?tag=pfamazon01-20

and the software from COMPADRE:

https://www.compadre.org/osp/

I need to say though that coding it in Java is a lot of work as you'll have to learn how to code differential equations in Java using OSP and then worry about errors introduced into your model from rounding and approximations.

 

[Vanadium 50]

It would be interesting to use a Lagrangian formulation

Interesting? As in "this new recipe is....interesting"?

If you put in damping, your Lagrangian now becomes explicitly time-dependent. Not fatal. but not pleasant.

I haven't solved such a problem since I was an undergrad, but I believe the trick is to start with the undamped system, find the normal modes, and then perturb those solutions with the damping (dampening?). This assumes the damping is small.

 

[somePhysicsMajorUCSB]

Thanks I appreciate that.

It would be interesting to use a Lagrangian formulation to obviate the need for sticks and forces although coming up with one that mimics the system might be hard and solving it even harder.

The Hummel paper I mentioned earlier did some work on body mechanics using Matlab code so that would be worth studying.

But I think you'll need to focus on one technique to model and go through the experiments and modeling to see where you stand. I'm afraid you might get lost in the weeds.

I took a course in modeling systems and for my final project tried to model the Feynman Frisbie in Java using the Open Source physics. In the end, I got the code to run but wasn't happy with it. My professor gave me an A for effort I guess. (he didn't know Java as he had taught earlier versions of the course with an older BASIC-based OpenSource Physics framework)

In contrast, the other student in the class (we had four signups but two dropped out within the first week) did a handwavium project and he got an A for thinking about it. I don't remember what his was on.

We used the book:

https://www.amazon.com/Open-Source-Physics-Users-Examples/dp/080537759X?tag=pfamazon01-20

and the software from COMPADRE:

https://www.compadre.org/osp/

I need to say though that coding it in Java is a lot of work as you'll have to learn how to code differential equations in Java using OSP and then worry about errors introduced into your model from rounding and approximations.

I appreciate this guidance, I am going to look more into this during the weekend when I have more time to dedicate for this project.

Personally I would love to strengthen my own skills in programming, I like this insight of trying to incorporate Java into the project. I hear lots of physicists using Python to program, I am now wondering your opinion of which is the better language (Python or Java) to do physics in and why?

 

[somePhysicsMajorUCSB]

Yeah but he's a black belt. Its best to say that to his face so, as a pf member? I will be right behind you.
About 2000 miles behind you.

Thanks for the support,

Yeah but he's a black belt. Its best to say that to his face so, as a pf member? I will be right behind you.
About 2000 miles behind you.

I appreciate the support, I hope you have a good day

 

[jedishrfu]

From my experience at our company, most folks did analysis and modeling work in Matlab. However, more recent developments have brought in the Python Anaconda distro. Anaconda is Python prepackaged and preconfigured with many popular Python packages like NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib.

Python is good at prototyping a solution but not at running in production mode with a lot of data where speed is essential. Some shops convert their Python code to Go code or some other related language and embed it in Docker-style images. Other shops might use Java as we did.

Our company's transition to Python was also an attempt to reduce the dependence on MatLab, a commercial product with high licensing fees. However, it's hard to get folks to move off a platform they've invested years of study to jump into the Python world.

An alternative contender to Matlab has emerged and has been making inroads into the Matlab world called Julia. Its open source has a lot of user support and packages for all kinds of data analysis and simulation work. What it lacks is the responsive development environment that Matlab has. Julia utilizes the same syntactical elements as MatLab but can be slow to start up a session (it downloads updates and recompiles all the relevant packages) which compared to Matlab makes it less desirable to use.

 

[jedishrfu]

Interesting? As in "this new recipe is....interesting"?

If you put in damping, your Lagrangian now becomes explicitly time-dependent. Not fatal. but not pleasant.

I haven't solved such a problem since I was an undergrad, but I believe the trick is to start with the undamped system, find the normal modes, and then perturb those solutions with the damping (dampening?). This assumes the damping is small.

Yeah, I was thinking that the approach would simplify the sticks and forces and be easier to implement numerically as in the OpenSourcePhysics modeling scheme. However, I've been away from this for too long to help in any meaningful way.

 

[pbuk]

I hear lots of physicists using Python to program, I am now wondering your opinion of which is the better language (Python or Java) to do physics in and why?

Python because there are more, better supported, libraries available. I agree with @jedishrfu that the Anaconda distribution is probably the most convenient package for physics.

 

[Rive]

However upon studying the art I realized that some of the more theoretical side of American Kenpo to be incorrect.

Maybe worth mentioning that in such cases even the 'more theoretical' side would be meant to convey a specific experience as a reference material for learning something very specific and not for learning physics.
Thus, it's 'theoretical' only in a very subjective, perceived way.

To translate that to actual physics is indeed a very difficult and complex task.

 

[WWGD]

From my experience at our company, most folks did analysis and modeling work in Matlab. However, more recent developments have brought in the Python Anaconda distro. Anaconda is Python prepackaged and preconfigured with many popular Python packages like NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib.

Python is good at prototyping a solution but not at running in production mode with a lot of data where speed is essential. Some shops convert their Python code to Go code or some other related language and embed it in Docker-style images. Other shops might use Java as we did.

Our company's transition to Python was also an attempt to reduce the dependence on MatLab, a commercial product with high licensing fees. However, it's hard to get folks to move off a platform they've invested years of study to jump into the Python world.

An alternative contender to Matlab has emerged and has been making inroads into the Matlab world called Julia. Its open source has a lot of user support and packages for all kinds of data analysis and simulation work. What it lacks is the responsive development environment that Matlab has. Julia utilizes the same syntactical elements as MatLab but can be slow to start up a session (it downloads updates and recompiles all the relevant packages) which compared to Matlab makes it less desirable to use.

Jupyter includes Ju lia, Py thon and R. Two out of three ain't bad.