Say the Earth rotates from East to West (I don’t know which way it does).
Say you’re flying from W to E and then coming back again. If you timed yourself with a stopwatch inside the plane. Will the first trip be shorter? i.e. If you’re going against the direction of the Earth’s rotation, will you get there faster?
On the same note. If you’re driving from the West Coast to the East Coast will you get there faster driving there, and take longer to come back on the return trip?
What about track records? Since they’re measuring in 00’s of a second. Will running from W to E make a difference?
A person’s movement on the surface of the earth is totally irrelevant to its rotation. Look around you? Does it appear as the earth is rotating? No? Then distances travelled are finite.
However, if you were outside of the earth’s atmosphere, like further than satellites and space-stations, then your idea applies… maybe, though I don’t know the details.
Major Feelgud, to find out which way the earth rotates you have to look out the window and see where the sun rises and where it sets.
You can also easily check that, in practice, a flight from LA to NY takes about as long as a flight from NY to LA.
If I interpret your reasoning correctly, being on the East coast, all I would have to do is jum in the air and stay up until the earth’s rotation brought the West coast to me. It don’t work that way. And it wouldn’t be a good thing anyway because when I wanted to get back i’d pretty much be chasing the east coast forever as it ran away from me. The best way to get back would be to jump up again in the air and let the world go the rest of the way around flying over Asia and Europe. You begin to see it doesn’t make sense?
having said that, the prevailing winds in these latitudes blow from the west so you do get some help going east and have to go upwind when you go west. For this reason East bound flights are generally quicker. The difference in time can be as much as 20% between the two.
There is some truth in what you say about flights east to west compared to west to east. The Earth’s rotation causes the prevailing winds to in higher latitudes to go from west to east which decreases flight time in those direction. Its not as simple as getting up in the air and letting the Earth rotate below you. Most of the air is carried along with the rotating Earth and this would slow your process significantly.
As far as track athletes go, they are attached to the Earth and all events are measured as distances over the Earth’s surface. It doesn’t matter which way the Earth is going, the athletes won’t notice the difference they are all going along for the ride. Its true that they would go further if they ran west to east rather than east to west, but it would a longer distance from some outer space reference point, not over the Earth’s surface.
>> The Earth’s rotation causes the prevailing winds to in higher latitudes to go from west to east
Dr Lao, this is true but misleading. It is not like the earth rotates and the air stays behind. If this were true, the air stream would be strongest at the equator and it is just the opposite.
The air circulation is caused by the earth’s rotation in an indirect way (Coriolis comes into play here) and is strongest in the middle latitudes.