Originally Posted by
rydabent
A true life expiriment. Closet and other anti helmet crowd claims that if a helmet breaks it did nothing. Try this. Take an empty styofoam coffee cup. (make that an empty cup--sure dont want EPA nazis getting upset) Push down on it. It will give (that means taking up energy) and then will finally break. Since it took up energy before it broke it is doing its job. A broken helmet does the same thing.
The problem with this "experiment" is that it is stupid. It isn't enough for a helmet to do a tiny, pointless amount of energy absorption - that's like trying to justify sunscreen as a defense against nuclear weapons, a small parasol as a replacement for an effective parachute. To be worthwhile a helmet has to have some chance of reducing a dangerous head impact to a less dangerous one. Changing a 48 splat to a 47er (see above) isn't doing that.
To discuss the stupidity of the above further: even failed helmets increase the total head size (making head impact more likely) and rotational damage. These are significant dangers - so you can't even assume that negligible safety benefit of a helmet isn't outweighed by the negatives if you crash outside its design limits.