THE PHYSICS OF THE UNIVERSE AND TODDLERS

April 23, 2008 by Nicole
Filed under: Toddlers

On the History Channel last night I caught the tail end of a discussion about the physics of gravity and the earth. It was on a show called The Universe.

If you could dig a hole between any two points in a straight line (the straight line was emphasized) in the world:

DC to NYC,

DC to LA,

DC to Beijing,

DC to Finland,

To travel through the hole would take you 42 minutes. It doesn’t matter the distance, the time is exactly the same for all of the ‘tunnels’ that you would dig.

Imagine the tunnel is a semi-circle, like a frown: You would fall down, gravity would pull you (obviously),

then the velocity and speed you had generated would push you back up to the other end.

The time is the same no matter what the distance because of the steepness of falling = gravity.

Now let’s see:

In 42 minutes on any given morning I usually put in a load of wash, help my son get dressed, make breakfast, make lunches, get myself ready, pick up random pieces of playdough from the rug, have some sort of crazy conversation with my 4-year-old,

‘Mommy, where do butterflies go to the bathroom?’…
and take him to preschool.

Hmmm, that or freefalling to Beijing in 42 minutes… seems about right.