slow earth

[Skammer]

@Muad'Dib

All of you have forgotten the most interesting side effect would be the slowing of time. Relative to someone standing still in space, time for those on the surface of the Earth would slow to a rate directly proportional to the slowing of the Earths rotation. If you somehow managed to actually reverse the rotation of the Earth, you would reverse time itself. Of course all of us on Earth would be oblivious, but it is still interesting to consider.

Now, I remember there being a planet in our system (Uranus? Neptune? I forget) that actually does rotate in the opposite direction of the earth. If we could send astronauts to land there, they would go back in time!

[Mangetout]

@sunfish

Muad’Dib - you’re kidding, right?

I think he’s referring to a long-ago thread wherein a new member was stubbornly basing his understanding of spacetime on that superman movie where he makes time go backward by reversing the spin of the Earth.

[The_Long_Road]

Earthquakes, buildings falling over and the oceans sloshing around would be the least anyones worries if the Earth came to an instant stop. Considering that the atmosphere would still be moving, the 1000+ mph winds would wipe out anything above ground. The highest recorded wind speed was during an F5 tornado in Oklahoma at 318 mph and only home foundations remained in its wake.

Anyone underground would go flying into a wall at over 1000 mph, so unless they had found a way to defeat inertia, everyone would be doomed. Due to this, I suggest we never let this happen.

[theckhd]

@Tuckerfan

You probably don’t refer to a certain dinosaur as a brontosaurus, either, do you?

[nitpick]Apatosaurus[/nitpick]
And actually, since i’m not a paleontologist, yes i do occasionally refer to the mythical, nonexistant “Brontosaur.” I am a physicist though, hence the greater degree of “nit-pickiness”

@The Long Road

If you are standing directly on the top of the planet(rotation axis), would you notice any difference compared to standing on the equator. This icnluded movement of stars, weight, anything difference between the two places besides temperature.

Yes, some of which were mentioned in the link i gave above. A few i can think of off the top of my head:

1. Gravity would feel stronger, due to the lack of inertial effects (“centrifugal force”)
2. The stars would just rotate around a point directly above you, as opposed to moving across the sky in the fashion most people are accustomed to.
3. The length of the day would be longer or shorter, depending on what season it is.
4. Polar bears. This important physical phenomena comes directly out of Maxwell’s Equations. Penguins also appear, but they are perceptible only at the south pole due to boundary conditions, and decay away exponentially above the equator.

[note]One of these has no solid theoretical basis. It is left as an exercise for the reader.[/note]

[ZenBeam]

AFAIK, though, displacing the Moon to a higher orbit by any means - asteroid impact, the hand of Q, the Asgard getting a sense of humor, whatever - would increase the tidal drag on the Earth and force a slowing of its rotation rate.

I would expect the tidal drag to become smaller with the Moon in a higher orbit. The main effect would be that the tidal force would drop by the cube of the ratio of the orbital radius. The only other effect is that the Moon will be moving slower, but this will be negligable.