From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Wed Feb 09 2000 - 21:18:27 MST
Jeff Davis wrote:
> Funny, but I pictured the Jupiter brain as being alone in space.... utterly
> unmanageable due to the gravitational disturbance caused by the star and
> the other stuff.
OK Jeff, but what I had in mind was a system where you have a
heat source and a heat sink, so you have a long term energy cycle
going on. Your idea was brilliant and entertaining. I had a lotta
fun with it. {8-]
I spun off an idea which is far less dramatic but might have some
immediate applications: an interplanetary version of GPS. Looks
like we could orbit three atomic clocks around the sun somewhere
between earth and Mars, from which one could navigate to a precision
high enough to avoid another Mars lander debacle. spike
> The non-standard nature of this problem would probably make it quite
> interesting to someone jaded by long experience with "ordinary" orbital
> mechanics calculations. One thing's for sure, it's more than I can
> handle. Spike? (Amara, you should try this only if you find it pleasant
> and self-fulfilling. ;-) )
Orbitting inside a planet might be more than I can handle too, at least
in closed form, and I dont like wimpy numerical solutions. They lack
a certain beauty.
Here's one I thought about: suppose you had a solid uniform sphere,
Earth-sized, with a 600 km diameter hole drilled thru the middle.
Suppose the construction workers toss stuff in the hole just for the
fun of seeing it pop back up 88 minutes later. At first it does so, but
some yahoo on the other side has the same idea and pretty soon
a lot of people are throwing garbage in the enormous bottomless pit,
and consequently the stuff starts to hit other junk and lose
energy and a big ball of stuff starts to form in the center. Or does
it? What is the shape of the gravitational field in that tunnel?
We already know if one were inside a huge hollow sphere there
is no gravitational field, easily proven by one integral, but what
about a sphere with a cylindrical tunnel? spike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:26:43 MST