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Posted by Conrad C. Nobili on
September 12, 2000 at 23:19:32:
In Reply to: On the other hand.... posted by Curt on September
12, 2000 at 22:48:31:
Posted from Host: adsl-151-203-60-37.bellatlantic.net (151.203.60.37)
I guess what I was trying to say was that I didn't like your examples of flashlights and cameras because I suspect they are an entirely different class of problem. In other words, I think that for those items (big thin boxes) their major difficulty is with crush strength -- and that's not the major difficulty for a watch. The discussion we wandered into was about instantaneous pressure differentials from things like swishing items around under water or slamming them into the surface. The first seemed pretty obviously of negligible effect to me, and others have given reasonable numeric arguments that would seem to agree. The issue of impact resistance that you brought up with your near-surface flashlight and camera hijinx seems pretty clearly to me to be one of crush strength of big thin boxes, and not too relevant to watches. My intuition says that the dynamics of these sorts of surface events would all be well within the range of survivability for a small thick box like a watch -- and others (Ed?) have offered reasonable sounding numeric arguments that seem to support it.
I'm sure that crush strength is an issue for watches at extreme depths, but that's not where this discussion started.
--cn
Conrad C. Nobili Conrad_Nobili@Harvard.EDU Harvard University NDTL/NOC