Idiot of the year

[Fasteddie]

Originally Posted by DuncanR

Considerations and experiments like this kid did led Descartes to invent the concept of “momentum”, meaning “amount of motion”, and to state that for a moving body, as in a fat American kid, the momentum was just the product of the mass of the lard ass and his speed. Momentum is traditionally labeled by the letter p, so his definition was:

momentum = p = mv

for a fat kid having mass m and moving on a BMX at speed v. It is then obvious that in the above scenario of the kid riding the bike at a concrete wall, total “momentum” is NOT the same before and after the impact.

SO what you are trying to say is there was a loss of momentum at the point of impact. Where did the energy go as a result of this transfer? More importantly can we repeat the exercise and strap a KERS device to many fat american kids and have them solve the looming energy crisis?