What was wrong with Project Habakkuk?
I always loved that idea. It was epic Rule of Cool.
Had it not been constrained by wartime resource limitations it might have gone somewhere. OTOH, had it not been a situation of wartime desperation, it probably would not have gotten a hearing; instead it’d have been laughed out of the room.
The idea is also used in a terrific SF novel.
PS: Rule of Cool - argh
I think Mythbusters and other teams have tried building pykrete boats with little success.
At first glance, I thought this was going to be about relativity.
Well, the tooltip is about general relativity. I had no idea these alternate time standards existed.
TCB ticks faster than clocks on the surface of the Earth by 1.550505 × 10^−8 (about 490 milliseconds per year).
TCG ticks faster than clocks on the surface of the Earth by a factor of about 7.0 × 10^−10 (about 22 milliseconds per year)
Neat.
Apparently the barycenter is sometimes outside the surface of the sun. I guess that’s when they wind up the barycentric clock.
Gotta pull out on the Sun’s stem before you can twist it. Just don’t overwind and break it.
Assuming I understand what’s being compared to what, it’s interesting and a bit surprising to me that the difference between TCB and SI time is a half-second a year. Gravity-based distortion is kinda bigger than my highly naïve intuition would have had it.
It’s more than I’d have guessed also, but we’re pretty deep in the Sun’s gravity well. Escape velocity is ~42 km/s. You can ballpark the correction factor by just computing the Lorentz factor for escape velocity. \frac{1}{1 - \frac{v^2}{c^2}} = \frac{1}{1 - \frac{42^2}{300000}} \approx 0.9999999902 \approx 1 - 9.8 \cdot 10^{-9} \approx 1 - 10^{-8}. Which isn’t far from the given 1.550505 \cdot 10^{-8} correction.
The time thing reminds me of a joke: a man who has one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches never knows.
Been a while since you’ve worn an analog mechanical wristwatch, has it? Pulling the stem out is how you enable charging the time setting.
If we DID do it to the sun, would that resolve the whole DST clock-changing thing so we didn’t have to bother remembering to do it twice a year? It probably would.
HEY! Scientists! Get off your asses and do something useful, why don’tcha?
It has to be taken into account for GPS clocks or the system would not work. The curious thing is the velocity redshift error and gravitational error are in opposite directions but don’t cancel each other, the net being 11.4 km per day.
Oooh! I can do this!
Wait a minute…
As soon as I saw it, I had a hunch of what he’d done… but it took me three or four cycles worth of “No, wait, that’s actually right, so what’s the joke?”.
Didn’t he also once do the opposite of this, with a bunch of states missing?
Seems there’s even more than 57 states. Thanks, Obama.
What times of year are best to visit Mid Carolina and West Wyoming?
I’m also pleased that we now have a North Dakota, South Dakota, and just plain Dakota.
Well, at least we’re getting an idea of Randall’s measurement uncertainty.
Which one is North Takoma?