Human Body Dynamics: Classical Mechanics and Human Movement Aydın Tözeren Springer Human Body Dynamics Aydın Tözeren Human Body Dynamics Classical Mechanics and Human Movement With 177 Illustrations Aydın Tözeren Department of Biomedical Engineering The Catholic University of America Washington, DC 20064 USA [email protected] Illustrations by Dr. Rukmini Rao Mirotznik. Cover photo © copyright Laurie Rubin/The Image Bank. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tözeren, Aydın. Human body dynamics : classical mechanics and human movement / Aydın Tözeren. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-387-98801-7 (alk. paper) 1. Human mechanics. I. Title. QP303.T69 1999 612.796—dc21 99-15365 Printed on acid-free paper. © 2000 Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. All rights reserved. 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Printed and bound by Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group, York, PA. Printed in the United States of America. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 0-387-98801-7 Springer-Verlag New York Berlin Heidelberg SPIN 10715990 To the Memory of My Dad This page intentionally left blank Preface “The human body is a machine whose movements are directed by the soul,” wrote René Descartes in the early seventeenth century. The intrin- sic mechanisms of this machine gradually became clear through the hard work of Renaissance scientists. Leonardo da Vinci is one such scientist from this period of enlightenment. In pursuit of knowledge, Leonardo dissected the bodies of more than 30 men and women. He sawed the bones lengthwise, to see their internal structure; he sawed the skull, cut through the vertebrae, and showed the spinal cord. In the process, he took extensive notes and made carefully detailed sketches. His drawings dif- ferentiated muscles that run across several joints from those muscles that act on a single joint. “Nature has made all the muscles appertaining to the motion of the toes attached to the bone of the leg and not to that of the thigh,” wrote Leonardo in 1504 next to one of his sketches of the lower extremity, “because when the knee joint is flexed, if attached to the bone of the thigh, these muscles would be bound under the knee joint and would not be able to serve the toes. The same occurs in the hand owing to the flexion of the elbow.” Another Renaissance scholar who made fundamental contributions to the physiology of movement is Giovanni Alfonso Borelli. Born in 1604 in Naples, Borelli was a well-respected mathematician. While teaching at the University of Pisa, he collaborated with the faculty of theoretical medi- cine in the study of movement. Borelli showed that muscles and bones formed a system of levers. He showed that during some physical activ- ity the hip and the knee transmit forces that are several times greater than the body weight. He spent many years trying to secure funding for the publication of his masterpiece On the Movement of Animals.Borelli died in 1679, a few weeks after Queen Catherine of Sweden agreed to pay for the publication costs of the book. The first volume of On the Movement of An- imals was published the following year. The advances in the understanding of human body structure and its relation to movement were soon followed by the formulation of nature’s laws of motion. In his groundbreaking book Philosophie Naturalis Principia vii viii Preface Mathematica, published in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton presented these laws in mathematical language. The laws of motion can be summarized as fol- lows: A body in our universe is subjected to a multitude of forces exerted by other bodies. The forces exchanged between any two bodies are equal in magnitude but opposite in direction. When the forces acting on a body balance each other, the body either remains at rest or, if it were in mo- tion, moves with constant velocity. Otherwise, the body accelerates in the direction of the net unbalanced force. Newton’s contributions to mechanics were built on the wealth of knowl- edge accumulated by others. In this regard, perhaps the most critical ad- vances were made by Galileo Galilei. Born in Italy on February 15, 1564, Galileo became fascinated with mathematics while studying medicine at the University of Pisa. At the university, he was perceived as an arrogant young man. He made many enemies with his defiant attitude toward the Aristotelian dogma and had to leave the university for financial reasons without receiving a degree. Galileo recognized early on the importance of experiments for advancing science. He observed that, for small oscil- lations of a pendulum, the period of oscillation was independent of the amplitude of oscillation. This discovery paved the way for making me- chanical clocks. One of his stellar contributions to mechanics is the law of free fall. Published first in his 1638 book Discorsi, the law states that in a free fall distances from rest are proportional to the square of elapsed times from rest. Although Galileo found recognition and respect in his lifetime, he was nonetheless sentenced to prison at the age of 70 by the Catholic Church for having held and taught the Copernican doctrine that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He died while under house arrest. Newton’s laws were written for so-called particles, however large they may be. A particle is an idealized body for which the velocity is uniform within the body. In the eighteenth century, Leonhard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, and others generalized these laws to the study of solid bodies and systems of particles. Euler was the first to assign the same gravita- tional force to a body whether at rest or in motion. In 1760, his work Tho- ria Motus Corporum Solidurum seu Rigidorumdescribed a solid object’s re- sistance to changes in the rate of rotation. A few years later, in 1781, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb formulated the law of friction between two bodies: “In order to draw a weight along a horizontal plane it is neces- sary to deploy a force proportional to the weight ... .” Coulomb went on to discover one of the most important formulas in physics, that the force between two electrical charges is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Analytical developments on solid mechanics continued with the publication in 1788 of Lagrange’s elegant work Me- chanic Analytique. The foundation of classical mechanics set the stage for further studies of human and animal motion. “It seems that, as far as its physique is con- cerned, an animal may be considered as an assembly of particles sepa-