Ask Ms. Jessica Issue 45 – Breaking Your Fall (Patreon)

(The content for Ask Ms. Jessica comes from real questions from real people sent to AskMsJessica@gmail.com)

Hi Ms. Jessica,

I saw a mutant girl fall down and then break into pieces, but she was just fine. I guess she was one of those modular girls. I was wondering, do modular girls like this even get wounds? Like, if they fall do they get hurt or will they simply break apart? Does this mean they will survive falls from heights that would kill a normal person?

AHA! This is a physics question and one of my favorite ones.

Let me ask you something. How does your phone case protect your phone? Sure, it prevents scratches, but there’s another important way that it provides protection: it’s breakable.

When something experiences an impact, a shockwave of force travels through it. That shockwave has to go somewhere. Remember, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. So all the power of that impact has to do some sort of work.

Things break and people get injured because of where this force goes. If you break a bone, that uses up some of the force. If your cellphone shatters into a million pieces that uses up some of the force.

Cell phone cases give an outlet for all that force. Drop your cell phone with a case on it and it is very likely that the case will shatter into a million pieces, because it is designed to. Force will always follow the path of least resistance. So if it is easier for your cell phone case to shatter into a million pieces than it is for your cell phone itself to shatter into a million pieces, then your case will shatter and fly off in different directions, keeping your cell phone itself safe.

The same principle is used to keep vehicles safe. When you get into a car collision, the front of the car is designed to not only crumple, but also fly off the body of your car, taking the force of the impact with it. This is why bumpers fall off when impacted. The result, the car is totaled, but YOU are safe.

Modular girls fortunately operate the same way. For the most part, the same thing that would kill a normal person would kill them, compressing organs, rupturing blood vessels and so on. However, a normal person only dies or is injured on impact because when they encounter that force, it has nowhere to go. It gets stuck in their body and eventually causes blood vessels to burst, organs to rupture, and the like.

However, modular girls can come apart. So sustaining a large impact will instead cause their parts to separate and fly in different directions. The force is not translated to their vital organs because instead it is translated into flinging their parts every which way, thus keeping them safe. So, yes, in fact modular girls are safer than normal people when sustaining an impact, but it’s not because of a quirk of their biology, it’s because of how the law of conservation of momentum works.

Motion and force always has to go somewhere. You’d rather it go into flinging your body parts across the room than to squishing the organs you need to live. Of course, it’s a pain to pick up and reattach all those body parts, but it’s better than going to the hospital!