Wednesday, January 20, 2010

On a Time-Delayed Conservation of Momentum

This post begins with the age-old question: so why don't they just make the whole plane out of the black box? (And what IS the deal with airline food?)
The answer, obviously, is "that plane wouldn't fly, dumbass, and the black box construction wouldn't be as strong if it were the size of a plane, and even if it did fly and were strong and crashed hard enough that a regular plane would have been destroyed, the people inside would be torn to bits from the inertial shock"

...or would they? The authors here propose an alternate means for momentum to be conserved.


According to the old ways, momentum must generally be conserved at the very moment in time that is under scrutiny. To quote its original formulation in Principia Mathematica, "As yonder fast thing occurreth, so will the selfsame fast thing tend to continue at the selfsame time unless it hitteth a wall."

Under the new theory, the momentum must be conserved only within a reasonable amount of time - say a day or two. So in taking after the classic Einstein's Train thought experiment, suppose you are riding east in a box car, and holding a baseball out the large side door (to get to this point, suppose also that you are a soulful hobo, full of rich stories and a deep, caring personality that may explain why you decided to hold a baseball out the door). The train crashes catastrophically, the box car is crushed to splinters, and you are crushed to pieces, never to be remembered by the world nor mourned by anybody. You are dead. Wake up, reader. Wake up. Please wake up.




The baseball is free to go about its business. It may decide to fall to the ground, or perhaps go about the town. Perhaps another hobo will pick it up and carry it elsewhere, carrying on its journey and perpetuating the great circle of baseballs. But that baseball carries a substantial momentum debt - assuming it slipped frictionlessly from your lifeless hand, it should have flown east at the initial speed of the train. At some point, it must fulfill that debt.
So whenever it might decide to (likely at a more opportune time than when in the train), the baseball will suddenly jolt eastward at train speeds, and come to rest naturally through e.g. air resistance.
With this new manner of inertia, the rigid black-box plane could crash violently without harming the passengers, assuming that within the day they get to a safe place to allow their inertial debt to be repaid.


This means that planes, rather than "landing" (an action the authors predict will soon become archaic), can simply crash into a wall above the target city - the wall presumably also being made of the black box material. The plane sticks into the wall like a dart thrown at a board.

The passengers save their forward-facing momentum debt. They then jump through the windows. Nearing the ground, they orient themselves such that their front-side is facing upward. At the moment before hitting the ground, they choose to repay their inertial debt, and jerk forward (upward). Since they were falling downward, this cancels out their fall and even jerks them upward a bit, allowing them enough time in the air (and at more manageable speeds) to re-orient themselves feet-downward and land gingerly upon the ground.

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