Why does an open pot of water swish so much in a car when driving? Do we swish but we’re a “closed pot”?
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Your body subconsciously makes adjustments to various forces as they come so you dont perceive it as a lot of swishing.
You have more muscles than a pot of water so you adjust yourself without knowing it. Next time you’re with a sleeping kid or a drunk friend in the car you’ll see them swish around when you turn.
Water swishes becauese it doesn’t have a solid connection to the car, so it can’t start or stop moving at quite the same time the car does. This is called inertia: if the water and the car aren’t moving. but then the car starts moving, it takes a little time for the water to start moving: it has to build up a good amount of force acting on it before it will move. From inside the car, that looks like swishing. A closed pot swiches too, but the lid keeps the water in.
We’re more solid than water, so we have a more rigid connection to the car. Because of that, we don’t swish as much. But we’re still pretty flexible, so we do swish a little bit. It can become a serious problem if the car stops too quickly (for example, if it crashes).
>Why does an open pot of water swish so much in a car when driving? Do we swish but we’re a “closed pot”?
We’re less like a pot and more like a bunch of sponges in Ziploc bags. A pot of water has no internal structure. We do. We have organs, and bones, and cartilage, and tissues that hold organs in place. Yes, we swish and slosh, but far less than water in a pot does.
This has been well answered, so I’ll add an interesting tidbit about how we transport large amounts of fluid (i.e. oil tankers, etc.).
If you just put the fluid into a big tank it’d act exactly like the container. Such a large amount of fluid sloshing around would build up into some pretty wicked waves crashing against the sides of the container and topple the vehicle.
The solution? We break up the container into lots of smaller containers (imagine adding a 3d noughts and crosses / tic tac toe board to the inside of the container). This means instead of one big wave there’s lots of small waves and, importantly, most of them don’t hit the side wall where the leverage is greatest.
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