why doesn’t it hurt to lie on a bed of nails?
In: Physics
A nail requires a certain amount of force to break the skin. Stepping on one nail puts all the force of your body weight into one nail and breaks it easily. Laying on thousands is far less force per individual nail.
The hardest time is actually as you start the process, as that’s when you’re on the fewest nails.
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First off I believe it does hurt to some extent. At the very least it’s very uncomfortable.
Anyway imagine a bed of nails where they were so tightly packed it was indistinguishable from a solid surface. You could lay on it and it wouldn’t hurt.
Now imagine we slowly start removing nails. At first it will be unnoticeable because you are laying on so many nails that any one nail is holding up such a tiny amount of your weight that it feels like nothing.
Eventually there will be some gaps but the number of nails is still high enough that the weight each nail is holding is still quite small. A 150lb person laying on 2400 nails would have only 1 oz of weight pushing on each nail.
Now you keep removing nails until you get close to the point where they will start causing actual harm to have the most impressive bed of nails possible.
You could also think about it the opposite way. If the point of a nail was on your hand and weight was slowly added how much weght could you add before it was painful. Perhaps around a pound. Now if you have 200 nails all with that same weight over your whole body it wouldn’t hurt any more than the one did.
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Because there are many nails, there is less weight on each individual nail. So much less that they don’t break the skin. It’s probably pretty uncomfortable though.
Take your body weight, and divide by total number of nails to get the lbs of force applied to each nail. For a 200 lb person on a bed of 800 nails, each nail only has like 4 oz of weight pressing on it.
Imagine if there were only 10 nails. Would it hurt then? Extrapolate and understand.
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