Conversation

Replying to and
Not really. A collapse like that is a chaotic process, so details matter and models tend to ignore them. I.e. Earth is a spherical planet in a vacuum. You can precisely calculate how lobbing an asteroid at it would change its orbit. But try it and your rock gets nuked. Same here.
2
1
Replying to and
But clearly the chaotic process will go from being sensitive to initial conditions to insensitive as scratch size goes. A deep enough scratch should nearly deterministically buckle on that side. Like in picture.
Image
1
1
Show replies
Replying to and
I only have one semester of metallurgy in my past, and this is one of those spherical cow physics-perfect things, but I would say generally yes. in real life you'll never have perfect anneals or perfect alloys or grain structures etc. so there's some statistical accuracy there
Replying to
I would guess so. In general a cylinder should have a (probably continuous) set of preferred buckling modes. A defect will make one of these modes preferred energetically over the others in a way that's probably not hard to figure out.
2
7