What would happen if you fell through a hole to the center of the Earth?
wtamu.edu
wtamu.edu
This fool is mixing up atmospheric pressure and water pressure. If you're going to speak with authority on something maybe you should spend more than five seconds thinking about it.
After falling about 1.1 kilometers (0.02% of the way to earth's center), you encounter a temperature of about 320 Kelvin
No. The temperature at 1.1km is about 36c. Uncomfortable, but not fatal. Certainly not so instantly fatal you die before passing the 2km depth on your fall.
your dried up bones and remnants of flesh encounter a temperature of about 1200 Kelvin and are completely incinerated into dust.
Burning a bone to dust requires temperatures over 1100c. He is mistaking the temperature inside a crematorium for the temperature required to incinerate bone. 1200 kelvins, like a crematorium, will produce chunks of calcified bone, not "completely incinerated into dust".
God this is a lazy article.
Thank you.
It's an crazily inaccurate article, with some variables turned on and off and others like mascons/average surface height ignored.
Since gravity drives a lot of atmospheric pressure, I'm not sure that the "soup" of air at the center would be valid.
Another interesting effect is if the tunnel diameter is large enough, and air is allowed to fill the tunnel, then an arbitrarily large fraction of our atmosphere will now drain into the hole. This effect not only reduces barometric pressure at seal level, but there will be ongoing gas exchange between rock and air.
Last but not least, I'd be curious if the magnetic field flux is at all interesting/dangerous to you if you're falling through the molten iron core of a planet. It would also be pretty cool to use that magnetic field as propulsion.
Spent many hours with this 2-volume book "Physics for Entertainment" by Ya Perelman as a kid, and now I'm motivated to go back and read it all over again!
A lot of these Russian science/math/fiction books were available at very low cost during the '80s in India.
It remains one of the best posts on that platform imho, and unlike this article, is actually correct in its assertions and descriptions (to the point that human knowledge can be certain).
150 deep in a mine is about 1.02 atm. You'd need to go about 30km down to get 20 atm.
* Provided the object falling down is a spherical cow that is impervious to pressure changes and what not :)
Not to mention how the pressure in the centre of the earth is extreme because of the weight of the rock itself. When you have a hypothetical uncollapsible hole, you're explicitly removing the vast majority of that pressure. I'd be curious to know how those actual values work out for a "giant chimney" model though.
[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/286710/period-of...
F/m = a = x'' = g - px - qx•x'•x'
Here g-px accounts for linear decrease of gravity, qx is the air pressure, and x'^2 is the square of velocity.
That's a tricky equation and even wolframlpha cant solve it.
Hm ... 6400km/(200km/h) is 32h << 2 days
(and 200km/h is reached within 10 seconds)
Decimal fractions and the metric system form a dangerous cocktail in the hands of West Texas A&M University people.
Someone's bound to get hurt.
How on earth does this work? The Dead Sea is 0.4 kilometers below sea level and air pressure is about the same as it world wide.