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A math question about acceleration over a distance
"Dr J R Stockton" wrote in message nvalid... In sci.math message oglegroups.com, Sat, 31 Dec 2011 22:49:23, STJensen posted: Let us say that you had a 62,000-mile-long Earth-anchored space elevator and let us say it has an electro-magnetic repulsion accelerator along its entire length. If you were to accelerate a human so that he experienced only 2g (twice the force of gravity) during the entire length of the space elevator, what velocity would that human be expelled from the space elevator and how long would it take the human to travel the entire length? Since the elevator cable cannot be infinitely rigid, and will in practice be quite flexible, one will need to consider the effect of the sideways forces on its shape - unless the mass of a shortish length of the cable is large in comparison with that of your human and his accessories. Really good point. And the Earth is rotating so the cable must rotate with the same angular speed as the Earth. So, to do this calculation properly requires consideration of tangent speeds, tangent acceleration (tangent to the cable for those) and so forth. _ |
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