• noughtnaut@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    This is related to the “airplane on a treadmill” myth (go watch).

    Preservation of momentum

    I wanna say it’s incorrect, but really I’ll say it’s exaggerated. The man on the diving board is going to continue moving forwards just like the rest of the gear, he’s not going to suddenly stop on relation to the road surface. However, he is going to be affected by wind resistance (which scales exponentially quadratically with speed) so he will need to make a good forward leap in order to not fall behind because of that. If he doesn’t, he would be effective jumping backwards - but not as far as depicted (unless the car is travelling really, really fast).

    If the pool (and indeed, the man) were encased within an envelope to protect from that wind resistance, he would be entirely unaffected. So there.