>Force(s) cause the failure, not energy - they are two different things.
You are wrong, there can be no force without energy expended, they are inexorably entwinded. This is a common misconception of many.
>The heated mass is tiny - according to the article the bubbles are ~1 micron in diameter - and the time duration at high temperature is extremely short.
Forget the wikipedia research articles they are lab based, what I am talking about is real life where the cavitation bubble size can be up 50mm diameter and the energies expended are quite large and your inference that the short duration some how lessens the process is simply incorrect.
The shorter the duration the more energy has to be expended due to latency.
Another thing to remember is that the temperature estimate of 20,000K is extremely conservative, whether it is as high as 1GK has yet to be proved, but from research articles I have read it is somewhere between 50,000K to 200,000K.
Monitoring of the process in real life is difficult as the sensors have to survive for least a couple of hours in a very hostile environment as the ship comes up to cruise speed, as the slip cavitation is very high whilst accelerating the ship upto cruise speed and any measurement taken during this period are highly erroneous.
Regards N Mc Donald