PUB SCIENCE
or
Let’s see if our brains still work
Myself and Alan were in the pub last night reading the paper, and we started to panic about our brains. Possibly something you do when downing intoxicants, how much of our brains which the government spent a fair bit of money developing, still worked. Well they worked enough for us to laugh at the story that a child’s home chemistry set caused enough “toxic gas” to have an entire street cordoned of 24 style. But could we still do science in the pub. Well Maths at least.
Alan raised a problem he had been think of for some time. Where on earth could you, if walking at normal human pace, could you effectively walk without moving relative to the earths rotation. A moments thought threw forward ideas about needing the circumference of the earth and nonsense like that. And then, ping, our maths brains turned on and it was simple.
Assuming that we walk at 3mph, and the earth rotates at 1/24 rotations per hour, we needed to find somewhere that is rotating a 3mph. 3mph = 72 miles per day. So circumference is 72 miles, hence radius is 11.46 miles (just under twelve we reckoned last night). Assume a negligible curvature of the earth, the answer is just under eleven and a half miles from the poles. Of course it might be quite hard to keep up such a steady pace in polar conditions but this was a thought experiment. And out thoughts still work.