Questions about Snkow Skiing?

Question

I have a few questions about skiing:

Who, when, where was it invented and why?

How are Newton's Laws involved with the sport?

How would you calculate the speed of the skier?

Also how would I set up a calculation to find work done by a skier and speed?

Answer 1

Snow skis have been found in the Altai Mountain district in the Russian-China border, estimated to be 6,000 years old. It's a means of snow travel, independently invented in many different places, and could have an even earlier date of invention. It's popularly thought that the Northern Europeans invented it, but no one really knows when man first skiied.

Skiing involves momentum and acceleration, as well as friction and a great many other factors. The skier dynamically shifts his weight in response to changing snow angles and conditons, setting his skis at different angles, so that the kinematics can be complex. However, the basic laws of Newton applies, such as, "a body in motion will remain in motion until stopped", which is frequently observed in skiing and sometimes unhappily so. "Force equals mass times acceleration" would explain the centrifugal forces that a skier experiences when executing a turn. And, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" is a tactic employed by skiers, using muscle power to change direction.

Ski resorts have chair lifts which are supported by towers, so it's one way to measure the speed of a skier. If the distance between 2 towers is known, and the time it took for a skier to go from tower 1 to tower 2, then the speed is D/t, where D is the distance, and t is the time measured.