The Wisconsin Skier

Some of you may ask WTF am I doing mixing up physics on this site.

A lot of good skiers can ski without knowing a vector from victor, of that there is no doubt as any accomplished skier may know they ski without thinking of what is happening, they just do. Depending on my goals and the run I am on I think either a lot about the mechanics and dynamics of what I am doing or not at all. I rarely think of force normal, trigonometry, or Newton’s laws.

However, I think understanding the basic mechanics of skiing will help anyone become a better skier (or boarder). This list of basics includes how skis work, how the various forces we contend with influence our trips down the mountain, and so on.

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One of the items I’ve been talking about here are the physics of skiing and focusing on the basic Newtonian Mechanics of skiing. Of late I’ve taken the approach to talk about basic force and have dabbled in energy a bit.

As I have gone over here, I like to ski fast, so putting on my physics hat I’ve taken to analyzing at how fast one can expect to go on a given slope. Again, I wave my hand and in The Wis-Skier’s Ideal World there is no board (whether one or two) – snow friction or resistive forces and wind resistance is similarly dismissed. Also let us assume we are going to ski down the fall line of a perfect slope that is we do not have to worry about rollers or changes in the pitch. Yes, it sound ridiculous but all of those other considerations are nothing but distractions now.

First an improved free body diagram…
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Energy is a term we hear about quite a bit, we have a general notion of what it means, but unless we remember our basic physics we have usually have less than a precise understanding of energy.

We know our cars need energy to move, we know we need energy to heat our food, to light our nights, and to perform other useful tasks. However, let us focus on mechanical energy which is basically the energy objects have via their motion.
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Sir Isaac Netwon did not quite understand what gravity was, but the math he developed describes normal gravity extremely well. When you hear how artillerymen before Newton thought their projectiles behaved it is tempting to wonder how intelligent they were. Of course, they were no dummies, but humanity did not have the mathematical knowledge to describe how projectiles behave in our gravitational situation. Einstein’s understanding of gravity is much more intimate, it gets much closer to truly understanding WHAT gravity really is, but I’m talking about skiing down our mountains at speeds substantially less than the speed of light (be careful there or you will get fined & jailed)!
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