I recently watched a karate/tae kwon do demonstration of breaking boards, and once again I wondered: What is the important part in making the board break? Is it the speed with which the martial artist moves his hands/feet/elbows, according to the laws of physics, meaning any other trained sportsman who achieved that same speed could do the same? Or is it mostly concentration, summoning of chi, etc, as martial artists claim? –Constanze W., Germany
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Considering what an exercise in participatory science this turned out to be, you might guess I started by consulting ancient masters and visiting martial arts shrines to get a handle on the subject. Nah. I googled it. Topping the results was a paper promisingly entitled “The Physics of Karate Strikes” by Jon Chananie at the University of Virginia. On inquiry I learned that Jon, a good fellow who’s now a UVA law student, had been an undergraduate writing in the short-lived e-pub Journal of How Things Work, a venue that didn’t inspire the same confidence as, say, the Acta Gynecologica Scandinavica. Then again, other JOHTW articles included “How a Cruise Missile Works” and “Crafty Connie’s Hot Glue Gun Experience,” so I figured, hey, maybe this guy’s OK.
Now we were getting somewhere. Time to repair to the lab. I bought some one-by-twelve pine board and a box of number-two pencils, sawed the former into pieces of the requisite dimension, and upended a couple concrete blocks to serve as a platform. Never one to be accused of rashness, I started with one board. Easy. Three. Knife through butter. Five. I’d had more trouble swatting gnats.
