Project fo the r Matheletes out there.

Post Reply New Topic

A little project for any of you math addicts out there.

The acceleration of gravity is 32 feet per second squared. Or about ten meters per second squared ( a cannon ball dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa will fall ten meters the first second, and then 20 then next second, and thirty the next, and so on. In five seconds a cannon ball will fall ten plus twenty, plus thirty, plus forty, plus fifty feet, for a total of 150 feet (in theory, if you eliminate air resistence).

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to imagine an object falling at that same acceleration with out slowing down for a long time.

A loooong time.

In fact for six thousand years!

Imagine the cannon ball just never hits the surface of the Earth just keeps falling, and accelerating at that same rate. And does so for six thousand years.

At the end of the six thousand years how fast would it be going? And how far would it have fallen in those six thousand years?

I will explain how I came up with this problem later. First let's crunch the numbers.

I'll say a gazillion.

MOE = 100%, of course

Before I start this problem I have to clarify. This is a perfect void scenario, there is no air resistance and thus no terminal velocity? And it's calculated at a constant rate that you've provided in your example? Just some quick and dirty math in my head, that's going to be astronomical if that's the case.

Recalling that one year is roughly Pi*10^8 seconds, I get a rough calculation of 6 x 10^13 ft/sec

How did the number "Pi" get into it? Just curious.

Anyway- thanks. So the object would be falling at 60 trillion feet per second. Or about 40 trillion miles an hour. I am using the smaller American "billions" and "trillions" (not the bigger British ones).

The speed of light is only 600 million miles an hour.

Damn!

So the next question is how far would it have gone in all of that time?

Exactly. No wind resistance. No terminal velocity.

Its like you're falling off the Trade Center and the earth just vanishes before you hit the ground, but despite the sudden absence of the Earth your body still acts as if its being pulled by the force of the Earth's gravity and keeps on accelerating at the same rate as a falling object on the Earth's surface. And your body just keeps on accelerating for....six thousand years!

How far would you "fall". And how fast would you be going?

Correction, it is actually 3.15576*10^7
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questi ... -in-a-year
It is just a coincidence or memory trick. I like to start off with rough guesses, and work my way to the right solution. Helps my long term memory--like most folks my age I haven't gotten much practice for decades.

Thank you.

32 million seconds per year approximently.

Okay.

So if you fall at ten meters a second squared at what point would you hit light speed?

The Speed of Light is 300 million meters a second.

So it would be the square root 30 million seconds. Or about 5600 seconds. Or about two months.

Okay here is the reason for this problem.

One of the prophesies of the end times in the Bible is that "the stars will fall to the ground".

I will get back to that point in a moment.

According to the new wave of Flat Earth believers on U Tube there "is no such thing as gravity".

The reason that you and I are able to stay on the earth, and that apples fall from trees, is not because the Earth's gravity pulls us toward the center of a round earth.

The reason is that the flat earth (and the firmament above with it) are all accelerating UP ward. And that gives the illusion that things fall down toward the earth, and is the real reason way we stay put on the planet's surface.

So that would mean that the Earth is not just moving up, but is also accelerating up. And accelerating at exactly the same speed that we thought gravity was pulling stuff down: 32 ft/sec squared, or about 10 per meters per second squared.

So that means that since the moment the Earth began its been accelerating at that same rate.

And since modern Flat Earthers also tend to be Young Earth Creationists that means that the we must date that starting point of the Earth's acceleration at 4000 BC.

So that means that the Earth has been accelerating at the same rate a body falls in a vacuum on Earth for 6000 years.

So the Earth MUST be REALLY booking along by now at fast clip. And must have covered quite a distance!

So my theory is this: when God made everything he then took all of creation (earth and the doom shaped heaven above) as just threw it against a wall like a basket ball. When we finnally hit that wall the firmament will collapse on us (ie "the stars will fall to the ground") and it will be Doomsday.

The trouble is that we dont know what is beyond the firmament. The stars falling prophecy MUST mean that there is a cosmic wall we are going be splattered against.

So what we need is to combine the talents of Biblical scholars and math geeks to crunch the numbers- and to see if we get any magic numbers that coincide with scripture for clues as to how far away the wall is, and when we will hit it (ie when the world will end)!



( i am being totally tongue-in-cheek about believing in this. I am just wondering what would happen if you went with this idea that the universe is falling upward to see where the idea goes.).

Edit: I missed your point, ignore this

Good challenge.

Well in 6000 years there is 189,220,000,000 seconds. An acceleration of 10m/s/s would result in a final speed of:
1,892,200,000,000 m/s, nearly two trillion (two thousand billions)!

Using the formula for addition of triangular numbers, (n^2+n)/2 and multiplying the answer by 10, where n is the number of seconds it's been falling for:
1.79x10^22 meters it has approximately travelled. Writing that out in long format:
17,900,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters!


Though I see the whole flat earth principle as totally invalid, and a large number of its apparent new believers are just doing it for the humour I do believe.
Just as a list of points against flat earth:
1) Satellite photography, it shows a spherical earth
2) Numerous physics principles, gravity, magnetic fields, etc.
3) People travel around the earth from Asia to America, and America to Europe all the time without falling off the edge.
4) Here is a nice little proof you can do yourself. You can do this with boats travelling towards you if you time it correctly, or in Calais you can just look at Dover. Dover appears lower down than it is, from Calais, and boats as they come towards you rise above the "horizon". You can do some mathematical calculations with the heights of the cliffs of Dover and work out the curvature of the Earth (or just how much of Dover is hidden below the sea) and then prove the Earth is curved. A nice little discussion from the Flat Earth Society: https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/for ... ic=63369.0

strange
where does the gravity come from in the given example, if it's that far away it must be very weak?

There aint so such thing as "gravity"!

Thats the whole point.

If you are are true believer in this new Flat Earthism you dont believe in all of that Galileo and Isaac Newton claptrap thats been foisted upon us! Lol!

Newton showed us how if you drop a ball off the tower of Pisa it accelerates at 32 feet per second squared. It falls 32 feet one second, 64 the next, 96 the third, and so on. But he wrongly attributed that downward acceleration to this "gravity" thing.

What is really happening is that the whole flat earth is rising up at 32 feet per second squared to hit the ball. So not only does this constant upward acceleration of the whole earth pin us all to the earth's surface with out gravity, but it also explains how falling objects (which arent really "falling". Its the whole the earth that is going up to collide with them) "accelerate" at the rate that they appear to fall.

And the flat earth has been doing this constant upward acceleration since it was created at the date stated in the Bible of 4000 BC.

Understand?

Thanks.
Gosh! So what is that? From quick math in my head it looks like we are moving at six million times the speed of light by now. Einstein wouldnt like THAT! But we are dispensing with Newton, and gravity. So who needs Einstein? Lol!

Back to the whole flat earth point:Well, generally accepted physics does partially accept the earth moving up when your drop an object, but that object also falls. Gravity, is attractive, it always is, simple as. That means when you drop a ball, the ball is pulled to the earth, AND the earth is pulled to the ball. Flat Earth theory however is just flawed, less down to fancy things like the speed of light, but literally due to the fact, we travel in all directions around the earth, have objects in orbit, etc. etc. While the concept of the earth being able to move to simulate gravity if it were flat is a valid one, it relies on the idea of the earth being flat, which is flawed. An interesting application of such a principle however, would be in colony spaceships. They could accelerate towards their destination, and that could allow for simulated gravity.

Well...there is a whole industry out there on You Tube trying to debunk round earthism. Just go to U Tube. Or just tap Ban Dodger on the shoulder, and he will happily start a forty page thread of debate trying to persuade you that the globe making mafia is out to fool you into believing this round earth lie! Lol!

A couple of folks on WP were into all of this modern flat earthism (which is in part one more type of conspiracy theory). Have debated with them already.

According to modern flat earthers it doesnt prove anything to say that "folks sail around the world and dont fall off" because "you can walk around the block and not fall off the city block". The modern flat earthers conceive the earth as being shaped like a United Nations' Seal, which is also shaped like a round pizza. The crust that surrounds that pizza is the continent of Antarctica. The South Pole is not a point at the bottom of a globe, but is the entire circumference of the earth. So when you think you are sailing the world you are really just sailing in a big circle around the flat disc shaped earth.

So they get around a lot of problems with this model. But of course they create a lot of problems as well.



And these modern flat earthers differ from our ancient flat earth assuming ancestors in one crucial way- they claim that the sun stays on this side of the flat earth, and just hovers in a circle above us (the ancients assumed that the sun went underneath the flat earth when it sets- which actually agrees better with observation of how the sun seems to act in the sky).


But anyway one of the tenets of modern flat earthism is despensing with gravity by invoking this notion that the earth accelerates upward. And does so at the same rate that we think that stuff accelerates downward. So I decided that "sanity be damned". Lets all just focus on this upward acceleration idea, and just go with it.

Maybe the whole earth really IS just a big pizza pie. And maybe God threw the Pizza across the room at the acceleration of gravity at the moment of Creation. And maybe....some day this pie will hit Moe, or Curly, in the face. And that will be the End Times foretold in the Book of Revelations!