Low Impact does not Mean Low Injury
You may remember from science class in school that there were some very smart people throughout history who gave thought to things we “normal” people don’t think about. One such person was Sir Isaac Newton, and his theories about gravity, motion, and optics profoundly impacted the study of physics and are involved in our daily life.
Your elbow bumps a cup of coffee on your desk, and it falls to the floor. We don’t think about it, but Newton’s observations and theories of gravity and motion explain exactly what happened and why.
You’re sitting in your car at a red light and someone strikes you from behind. The laws of physics are involved here as your body is thrust forward, you experience sudden stress to your neck, shoulders, hips and head.
Newton looked at simple occurrences in life and reasoned that there must be a way to calculate the forces of nature using scientific methods. In the case of a moving object striking an object at rest, he reasoned correctly that two factors are important to determine the force (F) of the impact, and those are speed, or acceleration (a) and the weight, or mass (m) of the moving object.
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