do you know science?

Note spelling: altruistic

Ha, that may be true, but I think a lot of people use Usenet as a vehicle to let out their inner 10 year old child in a safe place, even if they would never act like that in real life. One of my theories of life is that men are the happiest when they are10 years old, about the time they start to spit and swear and then they have to live the next

Anyhow, back to the car crash. I always thought the answer you gave was how I thought about it but I am glad to hear that your answer seems to be the consensus answer, because it always bugged me a little.

They were *identical*, so the other car must contain a copy of you. They probably end up in a quantum superposition or something. (Is a car a boson or or fermion)?

I think you're imagining that they're mirror symmetric, but that's not what the problem stated.

If they're identical, then the other driver is on the left side of his vechicle. That means that the centres of mass don't lie in on the axis of the collision, which means that there's angular momentum.

And of course if my doppelganger were in the other car, I'd be in the Twilight Zone, which is emphatically _not_ ruled by idealized physical laws. ;)

(Rod Serling was a genius.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Since there are 100 Senators, and the US Constitution says "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State", my old college slide rule calculates 50 states.

There are all kinds of realworld variables, but I was assuming that both cars effectively coalesce with all energy absorbed into the deformation of the vehicles.

Ditto one car hitting concrete - no bounce

Nanobots

It wouldn't be, if you used a real news server instead of that Google crap.

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We can start by tossing Sloman and dimbulb off the Earth as useless ballast.

A few take less than five minutes. :(

In the zero order approximation, the two cases are the same.

As far as I can see, there's no way of making the two-car crash worse than the concrete, and a few reasons to hope it might be better. The original problem was already a feeble attempt at a gotcha, and if all these additional assumptions had been stated at the beginning, it would have been feebler still.

Kids: Don't drive with any spherical cows!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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It wasn't an attempt at a gotcha, as I said before, I have pondered this for a long time and this topic seemed to fit in this thread. (We all have our own ways of letting out our inner 10 year old child I guess :-)

Yup.

In the single-car concrete-wall case, if the driver is thrown forwards out of the car because s/he didn't fasten the seat belt, he/she flies head-first into a concrete wall.

In the two-identical-car case, each driver is thrown forwards through their own windshield, but does not hit a concrete wall. Instead, they each enter the other vehicle, through its windshield, on the passenger's side. If there is no passenger present in the vehicles, this leads to a case where the drivers *may* end up being stopped by something gentler than a concrete wall.

:-)

I didn't mean it was a troll, only that such problems (like the one that started this thread) are nearly always intended to show up faulty physical reasoning on the part of uninstructed people. In other words, it's the original poser of the problem that was trying to trip people up, not you so much. You've probably seen lists of such problems before--or did you think this one up absolutely on your own?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yup.

In the single-car concrete-wall case, if the driver is thrown forwards out of the car because s/he didn't fasten the seat belt, he/she flies head-first into a concrete wall.

In the two-identical-car case, each driver is thrown forwards through their own windshield, but does not hit a concrete wall. Instead, they each enter the other vehicle, through its windshield, on the passenger's side. If there is no passenger present in the vehicles, this leads to a case where the drivers *may* end up being stopped by something gentler than a concrete wall.

:-)

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I remember discussing it with a boss I had 20 years ago. I did not think of it ,I just always thought it was an interesting dilemma. On first impulse it seems that two cars going fast and crashing head on is the worst possible crash that you could have, but hitting a solid stationary object turns out to be just as bad or worse. That is what I always suspected, but I wanted to hear it from other smart people.

Yeah, but anybody who would voluntarily do such a stupid experiment deserves to be Darwinized. >:->

Cheers! Rich

No, it's just that when you don't bother to look up the spelling of a word that you're not sure how to spell, it's like mounting a big neon sign over your head, flashing "I'M AN IGNORAMUS!"

In other words, it impugns your credibility.

Hope This Helps! Rich