Effect of Internal Kinetic Energy Transfer on Human Tissue

draosz

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 27, 2016
Messages
341
Reaction score
32
Location
Croatia
Imagine an event: a person's body is perfectly immobile and safe while moving at a high speed, as in a vehicle. Vehicle stops instantly, and the person's body, being safe and immobile, doesn't suffer external force.

What I'm wondering is how the internal transfer of kinetic energy would affect tissues, organs, and organism as a whole, especially the nervous system; blood, cells, organs etc. would still hit each other and damage would be made. The speed would be somewhere near the threshold of causing irreversible damage to the brain, but I don't know how localized that would be.

- how could such a damage affect the brain, perception, cognition etc.?
- would other organs be affected, and how?

It doesn't have to be scientifically proven data, just ideas for what might be plausible in a story.

Thanks in advance.
 

WeaselFire

Benefactor Member
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 17, 2012
Messages
3,539
Reaction score
429
Location
Floral City, FL
What speed and how fast a stop? After all, E=MC squared. :)

In general, there's not as much movement as you might think, the body is pretty full and nothing has any extra movement available. Also, all the internal organs are generally the same consistency, meaning none compress much more than others.

Now, what do you need for the story? Loss of consciousness could be possible, though permanent damage to the brain likely is not without an outside blow to the head. Most injuries in rapid stop accidents are the body moving, not the internal organs slopping around. If the head can snap forward while the body remains still (seat belt in head-on collision) then the neck gets severely damaged.

To get the damage to the body you're describing, you need a serious g-force on impact. Think hundreds or thousands of mile per hour, not standard auto speeds. A sudden stop from light speed could turn inner organs to mush. :)

Jeff
 

cbenoi1

Banned
Joined
Dec 30, 2008
Messages
5,038
Reaction score
977
Location
Canada
Anything that approaches 0.2 seconds tends to get severe. You can kill a man with only 5G in that range. The neck and brain get hurt before everything else in acceleration/deceleration trauma. Non-fatal injuries are a concussion and a sore neck. You could get internal bleeding (hematoma) in the brain cavity and in the belly which can be non-fatal if treated promptly.

> What I'm wondering is how the internal transfer of kinetic energy would affect tissues

Mass is what kills. The brain, the heart, the bowels, all have significant masses. If the subject is endo (fat) or ecto (skinny) also makes a difference. I'm sure the US Department of Transportation maintains some sort of statistics for injury severity in accidents. Or you can just pick a recent case from the news that matches what you want and go from there.

-cb
 

Mark HJ

Cat whisperer
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Nov 5, 2013
Messages
188
Reaction score
17
Location
Cornwall, UK
Website
markhuntleyjames.wordpress.com
Imagine an event: a person's body is perfectly immobile and safe while moving at a high speed, as in a vehicle. Vehicle stops instantly, and the person's body, being safe and immobile, doesn't suffer external force..

What do you mean by immobile and safe? If your body is in a vehicle which stops, whether suddenly or not, then something has to apply force to the body to make it stop as well. It doesn't matter whether this is a simple seat-belt or a sophisticated tank filled with viscous fluid to distribute the force, there is still force required, and that force then has to be applied throughout the body. Since the internals of a human body can and do move, any sufficiently sudden stop will do damage when different parts move at different speeds - soft tissues can tear or rupture, bones can break, the brain bounces off the inside of the skull. Any of those are disabling or fatal depending on the severity. I have a recollection that vehicle crash studies in the US discovered that victims who apparently survived later died because of head injuries where the brain hits the inside of the front of the skull causes damage to the front of the brain, followed by swelling and then death.


It's worth looking through some of the later posts on another thread here which has some useful info: http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?320990-Super-strength-and-bone-muscle-density/page2
 

Old Hack

Such a nasty woman
Super Moderator
Absolute Sage
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jun 12, 2005
Messages
22,454
Reaction score
4,956
Location
In chaos
The body within the vehicle isn't "immobile and safe", it's moving as fast as the vehicle which contains it is moving. It's immobile in comparison with the vehicle, but not immobile.

As for what the results would be if the vehicle crashed or was stopped very suddenly in any other way--just look at the effects of road traffic accidents. It's not good. And there's enough information out there for you to be able to pick and choose.