The Phone Book Myth
2008 March 24
Apparently if you interweave the pages of two phone books together they are nearly impossible to pull apart. These two Dutch students won first place in a Mythbusters challenge demonstrating as much. Very cool experiment, but I think they should have been disqualified for referring to kilograms as units of force.
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I’m sure they were using the term “Kilograms” as short hand for “kg/m” (or whatever the equivalent of psi is). In America we DO say “pounds of force” when we really mean psi or foot pounds.
Josh, I hope you realize that pounds are force.
psi is pressure.
kilograms are not force, but I think it’s easier for people to understand what sort of stress the phonebooks could handle when you express in something they weigh their own bodies with.