Downtown Chicago just got a little scarier. Besides the latest Loop rapist, now you can also be assaulted by inanimate objects.
“Ultimately what you’re concerned about is the force that’s generated when object hits skull,” says Slavsky. “You’ve got an object that’s falling, so it has momentum. It falls on your head. Your head will exert a force on that object to change its momentum. Conversely, that object exerts an equal and opposite force on your head. So ultimately what determines the amount of force is how much momentum that object had just before it hit you and–now this is the real tricky part–the time in which that momentum was brought to zero.”
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“I have no idea how accurate these numbers are, but they’re close,” Slavsky warned. “I did some really sophisticated experiments, dropping baseballs and various things on my bathroom scale, watching how much they jumped, and trying to figure out from that the time of impact.”
Force: 1,000-2,000 newtons (220-440 lbs)
Dr. Slavsky’s Scientific Assumptions: “I’m calculating that the impact time of a brick will be at least as short as a baseball, probably even shorter.”
Projectile: Quarter Pounder
