Why jumping into water from great height feels like landing in concrete?
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The water needs time to move out of the way. If you jump from high up, you are too fast, so the water cant get out of the way fast enough for you to noticeably sink into the water on impact. This means you are decelerating from your speed (which is fast, because you’ve been falling from high up) to near-zero in just a few centimetres. This deceleration is what hurts/kills you.
This is Newton’s 3rd law: action-reaction forces, when you give the water a huge kinetic force, it will react back to you with equally the same force.
The water needs time to move out of the way. If you jump from high up, you are too fast, so the water cant get out of the way fast enough for you to noticeably sink into the water on impact. This means you are decelerating from your speed (which is fast, because you’ve been falling from high up) to near-zero in just a few centimetres. This deceleration is what hurts/kills you.
The water needs time to move out of the way. If you jump from high up, you are too fast, so the water cant get out of the way fast enough for you to noticeably sink into the water on impact. This means you are decelerating from your speed (which is fast, because you’ve been falling from high up) to near-zero in just a few centimetres. This deceleration is what hurts/kills you.
This is Newton’s 3rd law: action-reaction forces, when you give the water a huge kinetic force, it will react back to you with equally the same force.
Because liquids have this property called viscosity. It measures how much the layers of the liquid can slide against each other.
You can think of gases as having very low viscosity. You don’t really feel any resistance unless your hand is moving very fast through the air. Liquids have a much harder time allowing that motion. So if you splash into water at high speeds, it will resist your motion infinitely more than at lower speeds. Hence why it feels like landing on a hard object.
It’s the same as slamming your hand on a pool of water vs. a pool of maple syrup. You’ll hurt your hand much more easily on the syrup pool, even if all you do is lightly slapping the surface.
There are liquids that are much less viscous than water though. Supercooled helium (which is a gas that has been cooled enough to become a liquid) has insanely low viscosity, for example. But, needless to say, I wouldn’t recommend jumping into that.
Because liquids have this property called viscosity. It measures how much the layers of the liquid can slide against each other.
You can think of gases as having very low viscosity. You don’t really feel any resistance unless your hand is moving very fast through the air. Liquids have a much harder time allowing that motion. So if you splash into water at high speeds, it will resist your motion infinitely more than at lower speeds. Hence why it feels like landing on a hard object.
It’s the same as slamming your hand on a pool of water vs. a pool of maple syrup. You’ll hurt your hand much more easily on the syrup pool, even if all you do is lightly slapping the surface.
There are liquids that are much less viscous than water though. Supercooled helium (which is a gas that has been cooled enough to become a liquid) has insanely low viscosity, for example. But, needless to say, I wouldn’t recommend jumping into that.
This is Newton’s 3rd law: action-reaction forces, when you give the water a huge kinetic force, it will react back to you with equally the same force.
Because liquids have this property called viscosity. It measures how much the layers of the liquid can slide against each other.
You can think of gases as having very low viscosity. You don’t really feel any resistance unless your hand is moving very fast through the air. Liquids have a much harder time allowing that motion. So if you splash into water at high speeds, it will resist your motion infinitely more than at lower speeds. Hence why it feels like landing on a hard object.
It’s the same as slamming your hand on a pool of water vs. a pool of maple syrup. You’ll hurt your hand much more easily on the syrup pool, even if all you do is lightly slapping the surface.
There are liquids that are much less viscous than water though. Supercooled helium (which is a gas that has been cooled enough to become a liquid) has insanely low viscosity, for example. But, needless to say, I wouldn’t recommend jumping into that.
For the same reason that when walking you barely feel the wind, when running you feel a little breeze, when biking you need to partially close your eyes and if you’re going in a car 100kph you cannot stick your body outside the window.
The faster you go the hardest the water pushes against your movement.
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