ok, i was thinking about how tires flatten out a bit on the bottom… under their own and the car’s weight… and i was thinking… (assume: tires can hold infinite pressure, we have a pump capable of producing near-infinite pressure) can a tire ever not be disfigured?
I’m guessing no… and here’s why… if you inflate a tire to a higher psi, then the area on the ground would decrease to force the equillibrium to stabilize. repeat. the area at the bottom decreases, but it’s still disfigured. so would it work out to be:the amount touching the ground have a limit of 0 as pressure goes to infinity?
ye i would say the area of contact with ground will be inversely proportional to tire pressure.
if you were to drive in sand or something, you might consider deflating the tires somewhat to increase the contact patch and keep the vehicle from sinking
the forces that hold atoms together are only so strong, you would not be able to support the weight of car on a single atom.
Actually, vasyachkin, we have already established that we have a tire capable of withstanding infinite pressure. I don’t think that it is too great a jump of logic to assume that the same tire contains atoms with infinite cohesive strength, so we could put the entire car on a single atom.
I wonder how that would affect friction… Obviously we would not be able to get any real traction, so I suspect the car would slide into the nearest pit. The driver could then floor the gas and cause the single atom we happen to be resting on to explode as the center atoms along the middle of the tire fly past. Gradually we would dig a pit, until we got enough friction to move, correct?
Bald or tread matters little. You’ll need a tire of infinte hardness so there is no deformation of the tread. If you’ve got that then there is no point in inflating it anyway.
Oh, you’ll also need a roadbed of infinite hardness and perfect smoothness to get one atom contact.
no, you’d still be screwed. cuz atom doesn’t have well-defined dimensions. there is a RANGE of distances over which it interacts with the next atom thus thousands of nearby atoms would also be interacting with the pavement, thougth to a slightly lesser degree
the point being, this is a stupid question to consider
