The random interesting fact thread

In the movie The Wizard Of Oz, Toto the dog's salary was $125 a week.

If you shot a bullet at the sun, and it could somehow maintain it's direct path and velocity (~280m/sec), it would take that bullet ~17 years to reach the sun.

If the sun were a basketball, and it sat at the goal line of a football field, earth would be on the 40 yard line (on the opposite side of the field), and be not much bigger than a BB. Jupiter would be an additional 300 or so yards past that, and about the size of a ping pong ball. Saturn would be an additional 240 or so yards past Jupiter (nearly 6/10 of a mile from the basketball/sun).

If we were to hop in a spaceship traveling at the fastest speed ever achieved by man (Voyager 1 & 2), which is currently around 38,000 mph, it would take us 80,000 years to get to the next closest star (Proxima Centauri). And on the galaxy scale, that star is practically touching us, it's so close.

Jeff-66 wrote:

If we were to hop in a spaceship traveling at the fastest speed ever achieved by man (Voyager 1 & 2), which is currently around 38,000 mph, it would take us 80,000 years to get to the next closest star (Proxima Centauri). And on the galaxy scale, that star is practically touching us, it's so close.

Oh god.

So sad.

Hyetal wrote:
Jeff-66 wrote:

If we were to hop in a spaceship traveling at the fastest speed ever achieved by man (Voyager 1 & 2), which is currently around 38,000 mph, it would take us 80,000 years to get to the next closest star (Proxima Centauri). And on the galaxy scale, that star is practically touching us, it's so close.

Oh god.

So sad.

Even traveling at the speed of light (~670 million mph), the trip would still take over 4 years.

Just saw this very interesting fact on NPR:

Neutrinos, for the first time ever, have been used to send a data message, and the message (simply the text "neutrino") was pushed thru 787 feet of rock.

This fascinating story has potentially huge implications.

Jeff-66 wrote:

Neutrinos, for the first time ever, have been used to send a data message, and the message (simply the text "neutrino") was pushed thru 787 feet of rock.

This fascinating story has potentially huge implications.

Oh god.

So cool.

Damn. I've been hearing random interesting facts for the last week or so and thought it was a shame this thread died. Now it's showing a spark of life (yay!) I'm sat here, staring at the comment box, and I can't remember any of them.

Jeff-66 wrote:

This fascinating story has potentially huge implications.

Jeff-66 wrote:

If you shot a bullet at the sun, and it could somehow maintain it's direct path and velocity (~280m/sec), it would take that bullet ~17 years to reach the sun.

Some bullets go much faster than others. That speed sounds like a slow heavy bullet like a .45 pistol. A high-power rifle could get there in a third of the time!

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Jeff-66 wrote:

If you shot a bullet at the sun, and it could somehow maintain it's direct path and velocity (~280m/sec), it would take that bullet ~17 years to reach the sun.

Some bullets go much faster than others. That speed sounds like a slow heavy bullet like a .45 pistol. A high-power rifle could get there in a third of the time!

I was thinking the same thing. I looked up some numbers and even a .22 goes faster than 280m/sec (but not much). Seems like a 230 gr (15 g) Federal Hydra-Shok, which Wikipedia lists at 270m/sec. When you get into hunting rifle range you start to approach 900m/sec (3000ft/sec).

It would also accelerate as the sun's gravitational pull grows stronger and stronger the closer it gets.

It won't accelerate, since it's supposedly somehow maintaining its velocity, and speed is a component of velocity. Also, it's redundant to specify that a object with constant velocity will maintain its direction. A constant velocity already does that.

LarryC wrote:

It won't accelerate, since it's supposedly somehow maintaining its velocity, and speed is a component of velocity. Also, it's redundant to specify that a object with constant velocity will maintain its direction. A constant velocity already does that.

Then technically it cannot maintain a contsant velocity, since it has to change direction in order to keep moving towards the sun (which is not the center of the solar system)

The circumstances are hypothetical. The idea of the fact was that at 280m/sec it would take 17 years to reach the sun. You guys read way too much into it, but then, that can be half the fun of these things

Come on, people, more interesting facts! It's not like there's a shortage of them.

Here's one:

Technically, the U.S. and South Korea are still at war with North Korea. We are in a 59 year cease fire.

source

Los Angeles was known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula or The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels of the Little Portion although its official name was simply El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles.

KrazyTacoFO wrote:

Los Angeles was known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula or The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels of the Little Portion although its official name was simply El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles.

That's a mouthful

Spoiler:

That's what she said!

For every M&M you eat, you have to run the length of a football field to burn it off.

MeatMan wrote:

For every M&M you eat, you have to run the length of a football field to burn it off.

Or don't, and just get fat instead.

A typical human hair is about 1 million carbon atoms in width (that's width, not length!)

It takes about 20 human hairs to span 1 millimeter. So that's about twenty million carbon atoms across 1 millimeter.

Jeff-66 wrote:
Hyetal wrote:
Jeff-66 wrote:

If we were to hop in a spaceship traveling at the fastest speed ever achieved by man (Voyager 1 & 2), which is currently around 38,000 mph, it would take us 80,000 years to get to the next closest star (Proxima Centauri). And on the galaxy scale, that star is practically touching us, it's so close.

Oh god.

So sad.

Even traveling at the speed of light (~670 million mph), the trip would still take over 4 years.

Whenever you're talking about relativistic speeds, it's important to keep track of where you're measuring time. Four years would pass on Earth before you reached the star, but for the spaceship time would actually stand still and the journey would take no time at all. Since you can't actually get to the speed of light, time will never stand completely still, but you can get arbitrarily close to it standing still. That means that you can travel however far you want in a short amount of time, it's just that the rest of the universe will have aged a great amount. Also, from the perspective of the spaceship time is of course progressing at a normal rate. The difference is that for the people on the spaceship, the universe itself will apprear to have shrunk, so that star 4 ly away will appear to be very close. Go fast enough, and it will appear to be 1 meter away.

kyrieee wrote:
Jeff-66 wrote:
Hyetal wrote:
Jeff-66 wrote:

If we were to hop in a spaceship traveling at the fastest speed ever achieved by man (Voyager 1 & 2), which is currently around 38,000 mph, it would take us 80,000 years to get to the next closest star (Proxima Centauri). And on the galaxy scale, that star is practically touching us, it's so close.

Oh god.

So sad.

Even traveling at the speed of light (~670 million mph), the trip would still take over 4 years.

Whenever you're talking about relativistic speeds, it's important to keep track of where you're measuring time. Four years would pass on Earth before you reached the star, but for the spaceship time would actually stand still and the journey would take no time at all. Since you can't actually get to the speed of light, time will never stand completely still, but you can get arbitrarily close to it standing still. That means that you can travel however far you want in a short amount of time, it's just that the rest of the universe will have aged a great amount. Also, from the perspective of the spaceship time is of course progressing at a normal rate. The difference is that for the people on the spaceship, the universe itself will apprear to have shrunk, so that star 4 ly away will appear to be very close. Go fast enough, and it will appear to be 1 meter away.

You go ahead and keep saying that, I do not think it works how you think it works. Your scenario is inconceivable.

Well I don't want to derail, but that's exactly how it works, it's just a matter of having enough energy.
If you travel at 1/sqrt(2)*c m/s (0.707*c) you actually age exactly one year for every light year traversed in the observer's rest frame. So it's kind of like going at the speed of light, even though you're not.

There are observable phenomena that depend on this effect. For example, muons created in the upper atmoshpere would not reach the surface before they decay if it weren't for the fact that they percieve the atmosphere to be much thinner, so they have a shorter distance to travel. From our point of view time simply progresses slower for them.

edit: to prove I'm not crazy!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special...

Ahh, dear sweet sweet Lorentz transformation.

To travel 4 light years at the speed of light will still take you time. Nothing moves faster than the speed of light in any frame of reference. In order to be at your destination instantly, you would be breaking this, in fact to follow your logic through, you could (to your frame) go anywhere in the universe instantly if that were true. The imaginary spaceman will still take time to get from point A to B, just as light does, however those back on the homeplanet will have experienced more time to have passed than the spaceman.

To put it with another spin, in relativistic (and newtonian for that matter) motion there is no such thing as an absolute point of reference. It is equally valid to say that the spaceship is moving and both the Earth and distant star are standing still, and to say that the spaceship is standing still and it is the earth and star that are moving in relation to it..

You don't need to go FTL because the universe apprears to shrink. When I say that you can travel an arbitrarily large distance in an arbitrarily short amount of time I'm of course measuring the time and the distance in two different reference frames, which is not how you normally do it, but it's a relevant metric when talking about long distance space travel. The spaceship will have travelled 4 ly in one reference frame, but a much shorter distance in its own reference frame. The point is that you can, in principle, travel to any location in the universe within a human lifetime, as measured aboard the spaceship.

Regarding the equality between different reference frames, that only applies to intertial reference frames, non-accelerating ones that is. That is an important distinction, because it means that you can differentiate between the spaceship which accelerated, and Earth which didn't. During the travel, if it's at constant velocity, the reference frames are equal, but what that means is just that there is no experiement you can perform to determine who's moving and who's at rest. It doesn't mean that their descriptions of the universe are identical, only that they are equivalent.

I you draw on a dry erase board with a permanent marker it will not come off using conventional methods (soap, water, Windex, etc.).

However, if you go over the permanent marker lines with a dry-erase marker, both will lift off completely and effortlessly with a single sweep of a dry eraser.

Aaron D. wrote:

I you draw on a dry erase board with a permanent marker it will not come off using conventional methods (soap, water, Windex, etc.).

I've found that isopropyl alcohol works pretty good.

Aaron D. wrote:

However, if you go over the permanent marker lines with a dry-erase marker, both will lift off completely and effortlessly with a single sweep of a dry eraser.

Yeah, the dry-erase ink contains a solvent, often alcohol.

Nosferatu wrote:

You go ahead and keep saying that, I do not think it works how you think it works. Your scenario is inconceivable. ;)

IMAGE(http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7196/6997178423_9f361c5336.jpg)

I never understood why there is always one permanent marker by every whiteboard.

iaintgotnopants wrote:

I never understood why there is always one permanent marker by every whiteboard.

I'm mean to substitutes.

I'm not mean to substitutes.

Some of them like it that way...

Ours are because we had an admin who didn't know the difference between whiteboard markers and overhead markers.

Though actually they turn out very handy if you want to have something stay for a while during multi-day meetings. Once you know the trick they come off pretty easy, but they frickin' stay there until you do.