why doesn’t it hurt to lie on a bed of nails?
In: Physics
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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