Can you do an Assassin’s Creed-style “leap of faith” in real life?
Well...here’s a guy doing it for real in real life, so it’s at least theoretically
possible.
But your safety depends on what you’re falling on and how high you’re falling from.
They say it’s not the fall that kills you, but it’s the m*(delta v/delta t).
Okay nobody says that but mathematicians.
But still this is describing how your momentum changes over time or the impulse of impact.
That is to say if you can elongate the time over which an impact occurs or decrease the
speed at which the impact occurs, the ultimate force on your body or an object will be less.
So if you’re not jumping from too high a height and into something really soft that
can slow you down, then you could probably do an Assassin’s Creed leap of faith.
But a small haystack probably won’t cut it.
Thanks your question Tommy Lee on YouTube, now what else do you guys have for me?
Kristen Fredrikson on Twitter asks: Always interested in TV’s depiction of artificial
gravity and how you’d do it (or not) in real life!
Well Kristen, we’ve actually been thinking about creating artificial gravity for some
time, specifically in relation to orbiting space stations.
Take for example the recent sci-fi film Elysium.
It shows an orbiting space station modeled after a NASA design dating back to the 1970s
called a Stanford Torus.
These space stations would create artificial gravity by spinning.
What the astronauts would feel -- their artificial gravity -- would actually be the centrifugal
forces pressing up on their feet from being pressed up against the walls of the spinning
space station.
It’s kind of like being in a large carnival ride.
We’ve actually done tests on people to figure out how much artificial gravity we’d be
able to take on a spinning space station.
According to the math, as long as the spokes are long enough, the space station itself
doesn’t have to spin very fast.
And any spin below two revolutions per minute, we don’t get sick.
So that’s good.
What’s next?
Rami Ungar on twitter asks: what are some ways the Tardis could exist?
How could it work?
While we could tackle the huge problem of how to time travel, we did sort of cover that
in my video on Interstellar, so let’s take a different aspect of the problem.
How could a Tardis actually be bigger on the inside?
Famously, Doctor Who’s Tardis is a time-traveling London police box that allows the various
iterations of the Doctor to traverse time and space.
And curiously, the phone booth sized thing can fit a whole ship’s worth of tech inside
it.
How?
Geometrically what the Tardis basically is a police box with a police box’s surface
area but not a police box’s volume.
Let’s look at this in two dimensions to get a better picture.
So in two dimensions it’s kind of like this.
Imagine you have a flat sheet of paper and you cut a disc out of it, but then you replace
that disc with a three dimensional hemisphere.
Now, the two circles have the same circumference, but the hemisphere has a different surface
area.
In three dimensions, this is like having a bigger interior volume.
And the universe might actually have this “Tardis space.”
Physicist Mikko Lavinto at the University of Helsinki in Finland thinks that these differently
volumed space areas can explain not only why the universe is expanding, but expanding at
an accelerating rate.
It’s a theory without much proof, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
And you get to say “Tardis space”.
As always, thanks for your great questions!
And remember, you can always send me more questions for the Ask Kyle file on twitter
@sci_phile and I will answer them as fast as Tardis-space allows.
Why?
Because Science!