Sunday, October 30, 2011

The mechanics of sneezing

Last night as I was lying on my bed about to sleep, a violent urge to sneeze seized me, and I was forced to yield to it by letting loose an extremely powerful sneeze. The force of the sneeze threw me up into a sitting position.

This got me thinking: why do we throw our upper body forward when we sneeze? Obviously the sneeze is gas + liquid expelled forward, so by the laws of motion our body should be thrown backward by the reaction instead of forward. When a rocket expels hot gas in one way it flies the other, so our body should behave the same way as well.

Why is that not so?

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