- #1
Trance-
- 18
- 1
A wasp buzzes around my head and I'm annoyed. I smack it onto the floor where it is catapulted 2 meters down unto it. I watch the supposed corpse for about a minute and then I see that it is already up and about and ready to fly. How does it do that??
I imagine myself as a wasp-sized human. I jump off of over the head of my normal sized being (2 meters) and I would imagine that this would be my wasp-version's suicide. Maybe this imagination is entirely wrong but it led me to an interesting thought experiment (interesting, in my view anyway):
I have a cauldron the volume of a molten human being (let's say it's me: 2 meters of 80 kg mass). I fill it with wasps and melt them all. Once the cauldron is perfectly full of wasp-liquid, I weigh it. Either it will weigh less than the human or it will weigh more. I don't want to concern myself with the factual answer, I only want to consider both as counterfactual possibilities:
1. If it weighs more, it would mean that a wasp-sized human is lighter than a wasp so a fall of 2 meters wouldn't hurt it as much as it hurts the wasp. Is this correct?
2. If it weighs less, then the fall would probably be fatal for a human. Correct?
I want to know the physics behind it all. The weight of the wasp, the relative distance a human and a wasp must fall in order to commit seppuku, how the strength of bodies play in cushioning the fall etc. And perhaps my biggest suspicion: Pressure. What role exactly does pressure play here?
I imagine myself as a wasp-sized human. I jump off of over the head of my normal sized being (2 meters) and I would imagine that this would be my wasp-version's suicide. Maybe this imagination is entirely wrong but it led me to an interesting thought experiment (interesting, in my view anyway):
I have a cauldron the volume of a molten human being (let's say it's me: 2 meters of 80 kg mass). I fill it with wasps and melt them all. Once the cauldron is perfectly full of wasp-liquid, I weigh it. Either it will weigh less than the human or it will weigh more. I don't want to concern myself with the factual answer, I only want to consider both as counterfactual possibilities:
1. If it weighs more, it would mean that a wasp-sized human is lighter than a wasp so a fall of 2 meters wouldn't hurt it as much as it hurts the wasp. Is this correct?
2. If it weighs less, then the fall would probably be fatal for a human. Correct?
I want to know the physics behind it all. The weight of the wasp, the relative distance a human and a wasp must fall in order to commit seppuku, how the strength of bodies play in cushioning the fall etc. And perhaps my biggest suspicion: Pressure. What role exactly does pressure play here?