“I did the same thing only with a hand-held sledgehammer, so instead of standing and whacking the entire roll and maybe three feet away, I was on my hands and knees - point-blank. The R-Squared law says that 3 feet away compared to 1 foot away means the energy was 9 times as strong.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That must’ve been brutal as I remember getting stung in the legs with paper shrapnel even using the sledge hammer handle length distance. R squared law? I’m all things physics stuff so PM me about it. I’ll tell you about the “universal fan law” where the cube function rules. Good story there :)
This is probably more than you want to know but this probably explains what I meant.
http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-squarelaw.htm
You start with a certain amount of acoustical energy that radiates equally in all directions. The sphere of energy at one foot radius could be measured at a certain level. Twice as far away, the energy would fall to 1 / (2 squared) or 1/4th the level. Three times the distance away, would be 1 / (3 squared) or 1/9th the power level.
RADAR behaves the same way except it suffers the same degradation during its reflection, so the receiver gets the echo back at 1 (r ^ 4) so doubling a distance would have a 1 / ( 2 ^ 4) or 1/16 reduction. Tripling would have a 1 / (3 ^ 4) of 1 / 81.