Real life phenomena related to mechanics in physics
Answers
Mechanics, the study of moving and stationary objects, is fundamental to the engineering of nearly every sort of thing that humans build. In The Great British Bake-Off, there was an episode where the bakers built displays out of gingerbread. One of the bakers had done engineering at Cambridge. During the episode, as a throwaway comment, he mentioned that it didn’t matter what he was using to glue his display together with because the glue had no force on it. His knowledge of statics, which is a branch of mechanics, is what allowed him to calculate this and design a display that relied on the (fairly strong) compressive strength of gingerbread rather than the (fairly weak) tensile strength of royal icing.
A pendulum clock works because of the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass, meaning that the period of the pendulum is independent of the mass of the pendulum bob. As I learned more physics, it seemed more and more miraculous that this works.