Never has my Christmas Gravitation icon been so appropriate
It's been a pretty emo Christmas, so far -- more than usual. Seeing node357 has been the highlight of it, with my writing (now past 50 pages of what I hope to be the last version) running a close second.
On another note, looking up Tartarus on Wikipedia produced this gem:
"In Hesiod's Theogony, c. 700 BC, the deity Tartarus was the third force to manifest in the yawning void of Chaos.As for the place, the Greek poet Hesiod asserts that a bronze anvil falling from heaven would fall 9 days before it reached the Earth. The anvil would take nine more days to fall from Earth to Tartarus, making it approximately 4733.22 miles deep."
There really ought to be a geek award -- some high honour -- for using time and gravitational constant to calculate the distance of an ancient Greek underworld. I actually tried to do this myself in grade seven, but wasn't good enough at math yet (or now) to pull off the calculus of acceleration -- even after my ex-physicist father tried to explain it to me.
It does make one wonder, though -- when you throw Einstein into the mix, funny things happen to gravity. Erebus -- the layers of darkness surrounding Tartarus -- would trap even light, so does not that mean they could be considered to have some of the properties of a black hole?
And what of mass? Would Tartarus share Earth's gravitational constant? Is Tartarus oblong?
Clearly there's much work left to do in the physics of afterlives.
On another note, looking up Tartarus on Wikipedia produced this gem:
"In Hesiod's Theogony, c. 700 BC, the deity Tartarus was the third force to manifest in the yawning void of Chaos.As for the place, the Greek poet Hesiod asserts that a bronze anvil falling from heaven would fall 9 days before it reached the Earth. The anvil would take nine more days to fall from Earth to Tartarus, making it approximately 4733.22 miles deep."
There really ought to be a geek award -- some high honour -- for using time and gravitational constant to calculate the distance of an ancient Greek underworld. I actually tried to do this myself in grade seven, but wasn't good enough at math yet (or now) to pull off the calculus of acceleration -- even after my ex-physicist father tried to explain it to me.
It does make one wonder, though -- when you throw Einstein into the mix, funny things happen to gravity. Erebus -- the layers of darkness surrounding Tartarus -- would trap even light, so does not that mean they could be considered to have some of the properties of a black hole?
And what of mass? Would Tartarus share Earth's gravitational constant? Is Tartarus oblong?
Clearly there's much work left to do in the physics of afterlives.