I think of little else
If You Had A Pole Stretching From England To France And Yanked On It, Would The Person On The Other End Be Yanked Instantly?
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@TheBreadmonkey
In laymen's terms, yes. In physics terms, no.
Laymen's terms: Will the other end move at the same time as this end?
Physics: it takes 0.01 of a second to start moving your pole & it if it takes another 0.5 of a second to mo… blah, blah, blah… blah, blah, blah … blah, blah, blah … and so we can see it actually takes 0.6457 of a second for the other end to move.
@TheBreadmonkey a 20 mile pole sounds amazing until you realise it's a deeply terrible tripping hazard.
[Your Tailor with wide eyes throws hands in the air and walk off shaking head]
Does the Chunnel count?
@TheBreadmonkey Yeah, the relative speeds of stuff… solids, constraints of physics, so 6 something seconds… I was ok at science. Sorry!
I actually read this article & found it interesting. I also thought you need to get out more.
@TheBreadmonkey
I think with a little bit of encouragement from all of us, light could go faster
@TheBreadmonkey I don't think you could yank or push a 20-mile long metal pole, it would be too heavy. And it would need to be supported along its length or it would just sag into the channel under its own weight. If you wanted to poke a French person, it'd be more efficient to just get a one-meter pole, take the Eurostar to Paris, and do it there. You could explain why you poking them (le glorie de la science) too. You could have a really nice lunch and be back in England for dinner.
My wife said I'm not to do that anymore
@TheBreadmonkey bring back a baguette and she'll soon change her mind
@TheBreadmonkey
This one’s giving me the big physical chemistry mads. And I don’t want to watch a bunch of YouTube videos.
I’m going with “yank is a macro physics effect, you bunch of dweebs”.
@TheBreadmonkey
Also wondering if this started as an imperial vs metric joke.
@TheBreadmonkey yanking your pole?
@TheBreadmonkey If that is true, do we not have faster-than-light communication?
Even with a pole that was perfectly rigid, it would start distorting space itself if you moved it at relativistic speeds. Basically you yank the pole, it gets longer, and that extra length is a distortion of spacetime propagating as a wave down the length of the pole at the speed of light. The length over the speed of light later, and the other end moves to shrink it.
Another way to think about it is the far end of the pole is further back in time, so when you yank the near end, the other end hasn't been yanked yet. Again, ripple of spacetime travelling down the length of the pole.
That timespan for a 20 mile long pole is like... a tenth of a millisecond though. The spring force (because steel is stretchy) propagates a wave much slower, 5.4 seconds by this table:
https://dakotandt.com/en/velocity-table
Un...fortunately that's the time it takes for the steel to stretch out to 20 miles plus a yank. That's only when the other end would start to compress back. I assume the yanking wouldn't take more than a quarter second though, so a 5.4 delayed second yank would result in 5.7 seconds overall.
Oh 5.7 seconds plus that tenth of a millisecond 🙄
CC: @TheBreadmonkey@beige.party
Fedi is the best in the world
@raganwald @TheBreadmonkey the answer is "no", but it's a interesting question.
Makes me think of Space Elevators and how the big long cable works and how solids aren't as 'solid' as we think....
@TheBreadmonkey I wouldn't touch this with a 20 mile pole.
TL:DR it's a 6-second delay, presuming a 20-mile-long steel pole 🌸
@TheBreadmonkey I started reading the article but then my brain went, “Science, huh?” and disengaged
LOL. I didn't even bother. Saw the first few words and went...... Funny title - wry remark - post - forget.
I care not for this science.
@TheBreadmonkey Me either. They gave me the science prize in middle school and I was so disappointed. I wanted English because I planned on being a writer
You are a writer to me, Charlotte ❤️🙌
@TheBreadmonkey @purplepadma I’m not awarding my Anglo-France long pole construction contract to either of you two.
As a stand alone post, I assumed you were sexting. 😎
@Nickiquote @TheBreadmonkey Now we will never be reconnected to the EU
I skipped to the end 😂
It'd take 6.43 seconds for the French person to be yanked.
@TheBreadmonkey it's only theorical because Brits wouldn't touch Froggies with a pole
@TheBreadmonkey @madcollector
Leave out the middleman - the Poles have done nothing to warrant being dragged into UK-French poking contests. We should do our own poking.
Or is this the EuroPoking competition, involving contestants from all European countries?