The snapping of a finger was first depicted in ancient Greek art around 300 B.C. Today, that same snap initiates evil forces for the villain Thanos in Marvel’s latest Avengers movie. Both media inspired a group of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology to study the physics of a finger snap and determine how friction plays a critical role.
Using an intermediate amount of friction, not too high and not too low, a snap of the finger produces the highest rotational accelerations observed in humans, even faster than the arm of a professional baseball pitcher. The results were published Nov. 17 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
The research was led by an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech, Raghav Acharya, as well as doctoral student Elio Challita, Assistant Professor Saad Bhamla of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Assistant Professor Mark Ilton of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.
Their results might one day inform the design of prosthetics meant to imitate the wide-ranging capabilities of the human hand. Bhamla said the project is also a prime example of what he calls curiosity-driven science, where everyday occurrences and biological behaviors can serve as data sources for new discoveries.
“For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated with how we can snap our fingers,” Bhamla said. “It’s really an extraordinary physics puzzle right at our fingertips that hasn’t been investigated closely.”
In earlier work,...
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