Physics in Study Hall
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007Today in study hall I had the wondrous opportunity to crunch some numbers in order to evade utter boredom. Below you can see the fruits of my labor, in which I have used the relativistic time dilation equation to find the velocity needed in order for 60 seconds to be the equivalent of two minutes. As you can see, it's a very high velocity, and at the bottom you can compare the centripetal forces experienced by an average human if he were to be stationary or in constant-velocity motion at 6.75 x 1016 meters per second. Note it's not a particularly large number, only 1.55 Newtons, because the only acceleration is that resulting from the change in angular displacement. The velocity itself however remains constant. Also, the learnèd physics student will note the presence of the famed Lorentz factor (a.k.a. the Lorentz transformation to some), a modification to Aristotle's original equation made by Einstein to account for the fact that the speed of light c is constant regardless of the frame of reference. Isn't special relativity fun?





