Damn this made me really go down a rabbit Hole of thought.

Pressure is, of course, a force exerted over an area. We often think of air which can be dense like our atmosphere or sometimes so thin that the pressure can becomes discrete, which makes “pressure” lose its meaning. Because you then are actually just trying to measure particle interactions. (You see the dialectical shift from momentum and particle analyses to statistically insignificant variation as density increases).

But, let’s take a flat surface pushing onto another flat surface (imagine the jaws of the cutter and cable as both flat for my sake). We can easily apply the concept of pressure to this, where a large force might not break something if applied to a huge area (meaning pressure is low). But, let one of the materials become constantly thinner until its width is negligible, and you get a “cutting” action. The pressure goes to infinity, but this also makes the concept of pressure lose meaning, I think. The pressure exerted by the cutting edge to a cable does go up super high, but it just pushes the material to the side. You could imagine this as the material under pushing back and outward because of the cutting edge, and then the pressure from the material causes this. But it’s about as meaningful as describing 100 particles in a room as having “pressure”. It shifts to another thing entirely.

There goes my charade

I think I actually underestimated when I said 10 stories tall