Eli5: How do different kinds of force and energy damage things?

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Am I getting anything wrong here?

I think a knife uses force over a small area rather than energy, as pressure to cause cuts, splits and cracks.

A club can have the same pressure as the knife, but the club carries greater momentum and will knock around things more.

A bullet causes damage through the energy it carries and causes heat and deformations as it hits the target.

When people talk damage with bullets they use energy, but with melee it’s usually force. But when should I use them? Both are used at the same time but one is doing more of the effect. Don’t both result in work?

Like a force over a distance is work and thus the same as kinetic energy. Joules.

But if it’s pressure doing work I get unsure. I mix up how things break all the time.

In: Physics

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Force and pressure are two completely different things. Force is mass*acceleration and pressure is force divided by area. Basically the more mass and the faster the mass is going the more force it has and the more force applied on a smaller area the more pressure you have. When playing baseball the heavier the bat and the faster you swing it the harder you hit the ball in terms of force. For pressure think of a knives edge(suuuuper small area) with a lot of force. Cuts right through. That’s also why the sharper the knife the easier it is to cut. Sharper blade=thinner blade. Hope this helps

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