Posted on 08/04/2013 9:27:49 AM PDT by 1rudeboy
Silly premises lead to silly conclusions. Nothing new in that.
Interesting website. I’ve been aware of the XKCD cartoons, but not this.
Physics is not “silly,” in my opinion. Go and show this link to a niece or a nephew of a younger age, and see what happens.
We lose.
Indeed. They're weren't relativistic, but they still made an awfully big "bang"!
This technology is very far outin miles and years. A pair of satellites orbiting several hundred miles above the Earth would serve as a weapons system. One functions as the targeting and communications platform while the other carries numerous tungsten rodsup to 20 feet in length and a foot in diameterthat it can drop on targets with less than 15 minutes notice. When instructed from the ground, the targeting satellite commands its partner to drop one of its darts. The guided rods enter the atmosphere, protected by a thermal coating, traveling at 36,000 feet per secondcomparable to the speed of a meteor. The result: complete devastation of the target, even if its buried deep underground. (The two-platform configuration permits the weapon to be reloaded by just launching a new set of rods, rather than replacing the entire system.)Popular Science, Rods from God, June 1, 2004.
Thanks for making my point. (And your's is not an opinion, it's a fact, Jack.) The silly part is the premise of a 0.9c baseball in a dense atmosphere. It would have burned up long before ever getting to 0.9c. Ever see a small piece of space debris entering the thin outer atmosphere at 0.0000...c? Poof. Shooting star. Gone. You cannot suspend basic physics, go on to construct some "what if?" scenario, and then claim it's still covered by physics.
Oh, as to your suggestion, I would not knowingly subject any young relatives of mine to silly stuff like that before they had a firm grasp on the real principles of physics.
(That’s what public schools are for, anyway. Heh.)
We'll suppose it's a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. [emphasis added]
My favorite bit:
We have not yet considered the existence of a Supergirl.*
*She can't mate with Superman because she's his first cousin. And only a cad would suggest differently.
The various incarnations of Supergirl:
cool site!
Totally logical within the premise of the Superman mythos. My favorite thought experiment is what happens when post-pubescent Clark Kent 'whacks off'? Even in farm country Kansas, super sperm will find ...
In a word, all are toast [in an imperceptible instant.]
There's no point at all continuing with (my premise) ‘physics’ after the (silly) premise ‘magically’. So yes, *my* premise.
My point stands: Silly premises lead to silly conclusions.
We can do this all day if you want. (Actually, I'll quit right here. No point arguing against an intentional fallacy.)
The linked site says :
A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch", and would be eligible to advance to first base.
They don't give the kinetic energy, though. This follows directly from K = (gamma - 1)mc2. With beta=0.9 , this comes to 1.29 mc2, i.e. 29% greater than the rest energy.
I always recall this illustration:
Half a dime is about 1 gram and a baseball is about 150 grams, so we're talking about 200 gram equivalent in kinetic energy at 0.9c. If the Hiroshima bomb was about 10 kilotons, we've got a 2 megaton explosion.
"That's the wonderful thing about science, one gets such wholesale returns in speculation on such a trifling investment of fact." - Mark Twain
Then you best burn most physics textbooks and rid the world of such things as frictionless pulleys, massless ropes connecting point masses, frictionless surfaces, continuous mass distributions etc.
Relativistic Baseball?
I knew the pitchers were getting fast, but...
Simplification (e.g., a point mass) to enable mathematical description is not the same as ‘magic’ as used in the article. JMHO.
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