eli5 According to Newton’s Laws of physics, if a big enough person were to bumrush someone falling from a high place and ram them into a wall, could it save their life?

Question

I think it’s a pretty straight forward question, but to further explain it a bit, if someone’s falling from like a 10 story building, and they were hit perfectly from the side, and slammed into a solid wall, could the two additional forces cause enough of a difference in their decent to save their life?

In: Physics

Answer 1

Great question! You have touched on an important point in Newtonian physics! Forces in perpendicular directions to not affect the movement in the original direction. When I taught physics, we would do an experiment where a light ball (like the kind in a ball pit) would be dropped from a height, and an identical ball would be dropped from the same height but in front of a fan (adding a horizontal force) The two balls hit the ground at the same time, even though the ball dropped in from on the fan had been blown horizontally. The vertical component of speed had not changed at all due to the horizontal force of the wind from the fan.