How come if you lay on a single nail you’ll get stabbed but if you lay on a bed of nails it won’t hurt you and your body can lay in it?
In: Biology
when you lay on a big space, the load is spread evenly. the forces that exist between your body and the nails aren’t enough to damage your skin. hovewer, if you’re trying to lay or step on a single nail, it has to support it all alone, it’s whole weight, I. e. you’re pressing down with quite a high force.
People say it “spreads” the force but I don’t think that’s the most intuitive approach. Think of it like this. It takes a certain amount of force for a nail to pierce human skin. To push two nails through at once, you need twice as much force. The weight of your body under gravity, is more than enough force to push a nail through your skin. but it’s not enough force to push hundreds of nails through simultaneously.
Even Distribution of weight. A single nail cant support all your weight so it goes through you. But if you have hundreds of nails each holding up a little bit of your weight then they wont go through you.
It’s a matter of weight distribution. On one nail, with say five pounds of force (the weight of your hand, say), that’s all focused on one tiny point – the nail spike. But if you lay the same weight across one thousand nails evenly, each nail is distributing 1/1,000th of the weight *equally.*
The weight is distributed among them so that the pressure exerted by each nail is not enough to puncture the person’s skin. Multiple contact points disperses the pressure vs less contact points.
It has to do with tension and surface area. If you sit on a nail it’s all your weight on one nail. If you lay on a bed of nails, it’s your weight distributed across several points which reduces tension on your skin and pressure on the individual nails.
Your spreading the tension over greater surface area, therefore less force on one particular nail. Your equally spreading the force over loads of nails
Latest Answers