🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr15.173142.6990@cis.uab.edu>, menon@ftp.phy.uab.edu (Govind Menon) writes:
|> The case of the hard sphere and plane is an interesting scenario, but by no 
|> means realistic.  If however, you do wish to conduct a thought experiment, 
|> constrained to idealizations, then permit me if you will to make yet another
|> reasonable assumption.  
|> 

Reasonable assumptions imply that you're looking at a range of phenomena for
which the assumption is adequate.  In biophysics, there might be arguments
where a comment such as 'Consider a spherical frog' makes all the sense in
the world...


|> There is nothing preventing a perfectly spherical and a perfectly planar 
|> material from being infinitely rigid.  Subject to this condition the bodies
|> do not have to deform under infinite pressure at the contact point.  

There's a problem with this in the relativistic limit -- something
infinitely rigid would transmit the signal instantaneously.  An infinitely
rigid ball only makes sense in a limit where the stiffness makes a
transmission speed much greater than any of the other dynamics in the
problem.

Dan