The Green Felt Void
My master's thesis supervisor told me once that the claim has been made that if you scaled a billiards cue ball up to the size of the Earth, the cue ball would have a more rugged topography. I think it's probably true. A cue ball is 2.25 inches (5.715 centimeters) in diameter, plus or minus 0.005 inches (0.0127 centimeters). I am going to round some stats for the Earth to keep the math simple. It is roughly 13,000 kilometers in diameter. Mount Everest is about 8,900 meters high, and the deepest trench in the ocean, the Mariana Trench off Southeast Asia, gets to about 11,000 meters deep. So the Earth has a range in topography of about 20,000 meters.
If you scaled the Earth down to the size of a beach ball, one meter in diameter, then the range in topography, from the highest to lowest point on the mini-Earth's surface, would be about 0.0015 meters, or 1.5 millimeters. If you scaled Earth all the way to the size of a cue ball, the range in topography would be about 8.8x10-5 meters, or a bit less than one one-hundredth of a millimeter. Unfortunately I have no idea to what finish cue balls are polished, but the Earth, shrunk to the size of a cue ball, would be about ten times smoother than the officially-allowed range in cue ball dimensions.
Whether the Earth would roll as well as a cue ball is a slightly different question. For one thing, a cue ball's topography is probably spread pretty homogeneously around its surface. Perhaps more importantly, the Earth is not spherical but oblate. It is wider at the equator than at the poles by about 43 kilometers (difference in diameter). This difference would be about 1.9x10-4 meters on our cue ball Earth, or about 0.19 millimeters. So the Earth, even given its non-sphericity, could qualify as cue ball-shaped (the range allowed is plus or minus 0.127 millimeters, or a total range of 0.254 millimeters). But because the Earth's deviation in size is systematically distributed, not randomly distributed like I suppose a cue ball's is, it could roll a little funny.
But so that's how smooth the Earth is. My girlfriend and I went camping with some friends at Big Bend National Park in West Texas over the Labor Day weekend. Up at about 4,000 feet, the air is noticeably colder than where I live (somewhere around 400 feet). Local weather and lack of humidity certainly affected things, too. But 4,000 feet was our base camp elevation. We went on day hikes - ones at lower elevation (down to around 2,000 feet I think) were much sweatier. We got up to over 7,600 feet, and had we not been hiking, we would have been shivering. This is a difference of about one mile. I travel over four miles to work every day. It just goes to show how much faster things change vertically than they do horizontally in this crazy world.
Information was gathered from:
Basic Earth Facts
http://geography.about.com/
http://geology.com/
World Pool-Billiard Association
http://www.wpa-pool.com/index.asp?content=rules_spec
If you scaled the Earth down to the size of a beach ball, one meter in diameter, then the range in topography, from the highest to lowest point on the mini-Earth's surface, would be about 0.0015 meters, or 1.5 millimeters. If you scaled Earth all the way to the size of a cue ball, the range in topography would be about 8.8x10-5 meters, or a bit less than one one-hundredth of a millimeter. Unfortunately I have no idea to what finish cue balls are polished, but the Earth, shrunk to the size of a cue ball, would be about ten times smoother than the officially-allowed range in cue ball dimensions.
Whether the Earth would roll as well as a cue ball is a slightly different question. For one thing, a cue ball's topography is probably spread pretty homogeneously around its surface. Perhaps more importantly, the Earth is not spherical but oblate. It is wider at the equator than at the poles by about 43 kilometers (difference in diameter). This difference would be about 1.9x10-4 meters on our cue ball Earth, or about 0.19 millimeters. So the Earth, even given its non-sphericity, could qualify as cue ball-shaped (the range allowed is plus or minus 0.127 millimeters, or a total range of 0.254 millimeters). But because the Earth's deviation in size is systematically distributed, not randomly distributed like I suppose a cue ball's is, it could roll a little funny.
But so that's how smooth the Earth is. My girlfriend and I went camping with some friends at Big Bend National Park in West Texas over the Labor Day weekend. Up at about 4,000 feet, the air is noticeably colder than where I live (somewhere around 400 feet). Local weather and lack of humidity certainly affected things, too. But 4,000 feet was our base camp elevation. We went on day hikes - ones at lower elevation (down to around 2,000 feet I think) were much sweatier. We got up to over 7,600 feet, and had we not been hiking, we would have been shivering. This is a difference of about one mile. I travel over four miles to work every day. It just goes to show how much faster things change vertically than they do horizontally in this crazy world.
Information was gathered from:
Basic Earth Facts
http://geography.about.com/
http://geology.com/
World Pool-Billiard Association
http://www.wpa-pool.com/index.asp?content=rules_spec
posted by john at
9:48 AM
1 Comments:
so, in a quantum physics train of thought, if there were a pool cue scaled up to the ratio wherein the earth would, in comparison, equate the size of the cue ball, during the hypothetical break, would we even notice anything aside from a change in atmospherical pressure and a chalky blue hailstorm*?
*i believe the chalk would burn up in the atmosphere before it made landfall.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home