Selachimorpha
Contributor
Speaking of "inexact science" what you also need to consider is a number of things with regard to the acctual pressure on your body during a dive. You need to be completely horizontal during your entire dive for your whole body to experience the same amount of pressure. A lot of divers spend some of their time vertical, some horizontal. The different parts of your body are now experiencing different pressures. The pressure on your dive computer or depth gauge is not necessarily the same as the pressure on your body. Further to that, I challenge you to take 10 dive computers and gauges diving and get them all to read the same depth (pressure). Depending on your position and the accuracy of the instruments you are using, maybe parts of your body are experiencing completely different pressures than other parts.
Measuring pressure is only the beginning, we are not even getting into physiological factors in unthinkable numbers, all different, day after day, always changing.
Someone on this board has a great quote, something along the lines of "Decompression Theory is like measuring with a micrometer, marking with chalk and cutting with an axe".
I think that really sums it up, its like all physics, you can develop as many theories as you want, but when you come to apply those theories in the real world, there are simply too many variables, too many factors that change, and you can measure as often as you want and collect as much data as you want, but in the end it just becomes statistics, along with all the limitations of statistics.
You have to think in terms of the real world, with so many factors you can never include in your calculations, like what you had for breakfast in the morning, if the left sleeve of your wetsuit is cutting of the circulation to your hand, if you see your favourite fish underwater and get excited etc etc.
I dive at least 6 days a week and see hundreds of divers, some of them doing crazy things and coming away unscathed, others with perfect conservative profiles getting bent.
What I do know from personal experience is that I can "feel" a good dive and a bad dive for my body. But maybe I am mistaken, and what I am feeling has no relation to nitrogen and is only to do with everything else that has happened during the day.
We just don't know.
Measuring pressure is only the beginning, we are not even getting into physiological factors in unthinkable numbers, all different, day after day, always changing.
Someone on this board has a great quote, something along the lines of "Decompression Theory is like measuring with a micrometer, marking with chalk and cutting with an axe".
I think that really sums it up, its like all physics, you can develop as many theories as you want, but when you come to apply those theories in the real world, there are simply too many variables, too many factors that change, and you can measure as often as you want and collect as much data as you want, but in the end it just becomes statistics, along with all the limitations of statistics.
You have to think in terms of the real world, with so many factors you can never include in your calculations, like what you had for breakfast in the morning, if the left sleeve of your wetsuit is cutting of the circulation to your hand, if you see your favourite fish underwater and get excited etc etc.
I dive at least 6 days a week and see hundreds of divers, some of them doing crazy things and coming away unscathed, others with perfect conservative profiles getting bent.
What I do know from personal experience is that I can "feel" a good dive and a bad dive for my body. But maybe I am mistaken, and what I am feeling has no relation to nitrogen and is only to do with everything else that has happened during the day.
We just don't know.