Well these are higher order derivatives, so they do have physical meaning but the latter ones are increasingly abstract and subtle from our normal earthly perspective.
If you think of a stable and perfectly circular orbit, that’s a steady and constant acceleration. Then if you thrust to make it elliptical, you’re changing the acceleration which can be measured as jerk. But then if that thrust itself is variable, you can measure its changes as snap. And then of course the rate of how much you change that is crackle, and so on.
When the fuck could those possibly be useful? 😆🙃
Not sure about anything past crackle, but minimum snap trajectory is widely used in efficient path planning for quadcopters.
I can’t even comprehend what something beyond jerk means in reality or how to even produce it by physical means
Well these are higher order derivatives, so they do have physical meaning but the latter ones are increasingly abstract and subtle from our normal earthly perspective.
If you think of a stable and perfectly circular orbit, that’s a steady and constant acceleration. Then if you thrust to make it elliptical, you’re changing the acceleration which can be measured as jerk. But then if that thrust itself is variable, you can measure its changes as snap. And then of course the rate of how much you change that is crackle, and so on.
If I was working with those concepts, I’d just start using numbers.
Like, acceleration is v2, jerk is v3, and so on.
These are n th order mathematical derivatives so I’m pretty sure physicists do something very similar to that whenever n matters.
IIRC the James Webb had/has max snap, crackle and pop tolerances. Not sure about these two.
Getting them just right is important for driverless cars learning to brake in a way that feels comfortable to humans
They aren’t useful. It is just scientists memeing. Any research that involves anything past jerk would be esoteric.
In aerodynamics I guess