Talk:Orders of magnitude (force)

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Restored[edit]

I restored the "force of sunlight on Earth" item. The link to the NASA Math and Science Resource site gives an estimated ratio of sunlight pressure to gravitational attraction between the Earth and the Sun of 1.63 x 10^-14. Converting this to Newtons by multiplying by gravitation attraction between the Earth and the Sun (3.5 × 10²² N, given further down in table) is trivial and surely not OR. I agree that the estimate depends on several assumptions and simplifications, so I have qualified it by describing it as a "simplistic estimate". Gandalf61 (talk) 14:45, 22 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ref no good?[edit]

Reference number 13 for the human bite force links to Houston T E, Bite Force and Bite Pressure: Comparisons of Humans and Dogs, 2003, supposedly at [1] but I can't find the paper anywhere there. Invertzoo (talk) 22:09, 14 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That paper is however to be found here: [2]. Invertzoo (talk) 22:11, 14 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The force applied by the engine of a small car during peak acceleration[edit]

How is this calculated? The two references in the citation take us to a Mini home page and the Wiki page about Minis, neither of which gives a direct answer for force or torque. If we calculate it in the simplest possible way, using F=ma, and take a = 0-60mph in 8 seconds (for a Mini Cooper), that's pretty much 0-30 m/s in 10 seconds or 3m/s/s. If the weight of a Mini Cooper is (for the sake of easy math) 1500 kg, that gives us F = 3 x 1500 = 4500 newtons = 4.5 kilonewtons, not 45 kilonewtons as in the table. Am I right? If so, the figure quoted in the table is out by an order of magnitude. Someone double-check please :) 82.71.0.229 (talk) 17:14, 18 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also, investigating this a bit further: If we look back at JF Kennedy's famous 1962 Rice University speech (one of the ones where he proposed putting astronauts on the Moon), it includes this nugget of information that was presumably supplied to him by some NASA rocket scientist: "We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor." [from http://www.explore.rice.edu/explore/Kennedy_Address.asp]. So back in 1962, an Atlas rocket was roughly equal to 10,000 cars. Checking for a more modern version of this, I found a transcript of a TLC programme where the Space Shuttle liftoff was compared to 64,000 car engines [from http://dotsub.com/view/77b5040b-51c3-47cb-b37d-b1e5e58dab05/viewTranscript/eng]. So both these suggest a rocket engine is ~10(4) times more powerful than a car engine. Now in our table here we have good, well-sourced figure of ~10(7) newtons for a Saturn V rocket. If we divide that by 10(4), it (again) suggests a car might be only around 10(3) newtons, not 10(4) newtons??? 82.71.0.229 (talk) 07:42, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]