From: Doug Jones (djones@xcor.com)
Date: Sat May 18 2002 - 21:41:53 MDT
Phil Osborn wrote:
>
> Hmm... I wonder if this could be the explanation of
> something that happened to me in the '60's that has
> defied all scientific analysis so far.
>
> Sometime in the '90's I happened to read an account by
> some news columnist about how one day when he was
> trapped in standstill traffic, suddenly his car and
> all the others nearby started sliding around on the
> road, as though they were on ice and someone was
> tilting it at random. He said that it only lasted a
> couple seconds and afterwards all the drivers were
> looking around at each other with very puzzled
> expressions. No significant local earthquakes were
> registered, and there was definitely no ice or
> apparent lubricant on the road surface.
>
> His description, however, matched precisedly my own
> experience. I had theorized later that perhaps a
> mini-black hole had been falling past.
Let's examine the physics of this proposed explanation. A massive dense
object falls through the earth nearby, unimpeded by air, water or rock
due to its minuscule cross section. For an object 1E-9 times the mass
of the earth, the acceleration 100 meters away would come to about 40
m/s^2, or four gees.
However, this object is falling by at something in excess of 11 km/s.
The acceleration would initially be upward toward the object, then
sideways as it reaches the surface, pulling downward again as the
objects dives deep. The interaction time would be about that needed for
the object to move through a distance comparable to your range from it;
at 100 meters it would zip by in about .01 second, yanking you and your
car (smoothly) sideways, along with every loose pebble and bit of dust
on the roadway. The net result is a nearly instant velocity increment
toward the object's track, and your change in velocity would be about
v=at, or 0.4 m/s.
Ascii diagram:
v 11000 m/s
|
|t-.005: car pulled up & sideways
|
|
< 100 meters >|
|
|
|
|t-.002: car pulled sideways & up
|
|
|
CAR |t=0: car pulled sideways
---------------------------------+-----------------------------------
|
|
|t+.002: car pulled sideways & down
|
|
|
|
|
|
|t+.005: car pulled down & sideways
But what of the lucky stuff closer to the object? At .005 meter range,
the acceleration is over a billion gees, and any air or rock within that
distance would be pulled inward at over 7 km/s. This would result in
Ghod's Own Thunderbolt as a column of air and soil about 2 cm across
EXPLODES with more energy than a comparable column of high explosives
(low density in the case of the air). The inwardly moving fluid flow
collides with itself, creating pressures and temperatures like a metor
impact in a column extending *thousands of miles* deep. Such an event
would not have merely tossed your car around- it would have blown your
windows out, left an obvious crater about a meter wide, and a channel
reaching deeper than any well ever drilled.
If you look at enough small quakes around the world, you'll inevitably
find some correlated in time in such a way as to suggest a collison with
a superdense object, but the other effects of such an encounter would be
glaringly obvious. Occam's razor suggests that you and the other
motorists experienced a small shallow earthquake.
-- Doug Jones, Rocket Plumber XCOR Aerospace
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