Speed And Velocity Quotes

I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?

So you want to know all about me. Who I am. What chance meeting of brush and canvas painted the face you see? What made me despise the girl in the mirror enough to transform her,turn her to into a stranger, only not. So you want to hear the whole story. Why I swerved off the high road, hard left to nowhere, recklessly indifferent to those coughing my dust, picked up speed no limits,no top end, just a high velocity rush to madness.

A sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower yet. But a kiss thrown by fingers- its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source that can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flight.

R is a velocity of measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental well-being, and not being more than, say, five minutes late. It is therefore clearly as almost infinite variable figure according to circumstances, since the first two factors vary not only with speed as an absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor. Unless handled with tranquility, this equation can result in considerable stress, ulcers, and even death.

The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight. No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, fleeing at velocities that approach the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the Terror of the Universe.

It's better to be slow and careful in the right direction than to be fast and careless on the wrong path. Be sure that you are on the right path before you begin to take your steps!

Those who would legislate against the teaching of evolution should also legislate against gravity, electricity and the unreasonable velocity of light, and also should introduce a clause to prevent the use of the telescope, the microscope and the spectroscope or any other instrument of precision which may in the future be invented, constructed or used for the discovery of truth.

The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening,” Miss Pao said, “regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique.” (describing a young man who flew off a bicycle at high speed)

Friends can speed up your steps or slow down your pace. Leaders choose friends wisely; they are aware of the consequences.

Don't rush in order to have things done early. Be prepared before you set off. That's the rule. However, this does not mean that you keep delaying the time for beginning. You must begin by all means! Go, get prepared!

Remember no matter how fast you run, you can't be the winner if you don't finish. As someone said, to be the first to finish, you must finish first! Go, take the strike!

Fascinating ... The whole thing [the school dance] seems to work on a similar principle to a supercollider. You know, two streams of opposingly charged particles accelerated till they're just under the speed of light, and then crashed into each other? Only here alcohol, accentuated secondary sexual characteristics and primitive "rock and roll" beats take the place of velocity.

hurry” was not a concept that could be symbolized in the Martian language and therefore must be presumed to be unthinkable. Speed, velocity, simultaneity, acceleration, and other mathematical abstractions having to do with the pattern of eternity were part of Martian mathematics, but not of Martian emotion.

The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.

Suppose a hole were dug from one side of Earth, through the center, and out the other side. What would happen to a man if he jumped into the hole? When he got to the middle of the Earth would he keep falling or would he stop? DEBBIE CANDLER RED BUD, ILLINOIS He would be vaporized by the 11,000° Fahrenheit temperature of the pressurized molten iron core. Ignoring this complication, he would gain speed continuously from the moment he jumped into the hole until he reached the center of Earth where the force of gravity is zero. But he will be traveling so fast that he will overshoot the center and slow down continuously until he reached zero velocity at the exact moment he emerges on the other side. Unless somebody grabs him, he will fall back down the hole and repeat his journey indefinitely. A one-way trip through Earth would take about forty-five minutes.

If you could buckle your Bugs Bunny wristwatch to a ray of light, your watch would continue ticking but the hands wouldn't move. That's because at the speed of light there is no time. Time is relative to velocity. At high speeds, time is literally stretched. Since light is the ultimate in velocity, at light-speed time is stretched to its absolute and becomes static. Albert Einstein figured that one out.

A police officer pulls over Werner Heisenberg for speeding. “Do you know how fast you were going?” asks the cop. “No,” Heisenberg replies, “but I know exactly where I am!” I think we can all agree that physics jokes are the funniest jokes there are. They are less good at accurately conveying physics. This particular chestnut rests on familiarity with the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, often explained as saying that we cannot simultaneously know both the position and the velocity of any object. But the reality is deeper than that.

(Time is relative, said Heraclitus a long time ago, and distance a function of velocity. Since the ultimate goal of transport technology is the annihilation of space, the compression of all Being into one pure point, it follows that six-packs help. Speed is the ultimate drug and rockets run on alcohol.

R is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental well-being and not being more than, say, five minutes late. It is therefore clearly an almost infinitely variable figure according to circumstances, since the first two factors vary not only with speed taken as an absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor. Unless handled with tranquility this equation can result in considerable stress, ulcers and even death.

We must have some room to breathe. We need freedom to think and permission to heal. Our relationships are being starved to death by velocity. No one has the time to listen, let alone love. Our children lay wounded on the ground, run over by our high-speed good intentions. Is God now pro-exhaustion? Doesn’t He lead people beside the still waters anymore? Who plundered those wide-open spaces of the past, and how can we get them back? There are no fallow lands for our emotions to lie down and rest in.

when another German scientist, Werner Heisenberg, formulated his famous uncertainty principle. In order to predict the future position and velocity of a particle, one has to be able to measure its present position and velocity accurately. The obvious way to do this is to shine light on the particle. Some of the waves of light will be scattered by the particle and this will indicate its position. However, one will not be able to determine the position of the particle more accurately than the distance between the wave crests of light, so one needs to use light of a short wavelength in order to measure the position of the particle precisely. Now, by Planck’s quantum hypothesis, one cannot use an arbitrarily small amount of light; one has to use at least one quantum. This quantum will disturb the particle and change its velocity in a way that cannot be predicted. Moreover, the more accurately one measures the position, the shorter the wavelength of the light that one needs and hence the higher the energy of a single quantum. So the velocity of the particle will be disturbed by a larger amount. In other words, the more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurately you can measure its speed, and vice versa.

R is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental wellbeing and not being more than say five minutes late. It

Scandalocity is defined as "the speed at which scandal measured in velocity can turn you into a star.

Never be rigid on an action plan that always fails, freezes and frustrates. Perhaps what you need is a change of your methods you run with the peak velocity!

Only the legs that run are those that really have muscles!

is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental well-being and not being more than, say, five minutes late. It

The velocity of light is one of the most important of the fundamental constants of Nature. Its measurement by Foucault and Fizeau gave as the result a speed greater in air than in water, thus deciding in favor of the undulatory and against the corpuscular theory. Again, the comparison of the electrostatic and the electromagnetic units gives as an experimental result a value remarkably close to the velocity of light–a result which justified Maxwell in concluding that light is the propagation of an electromagnetic disturbance. Finally, the principle of relativity gives the velocity of light a still greater importance, since one of its fundamental postulates is the constancy of this velocity under all possible conditions.

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had once been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities—the whole of the Midwest, in short—nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that’s just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean “selecting a slow death over a quick one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since Earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished.

What strange adventures await us in those yet untraveled regions toward which we speed?—into what malign conditions may we not at any time plunge?—to the strength and stress of what frightful environment may we not at last succumb? The subject lends itself readily enough to a jest, but I am not jesting: it is really altogether probable that our solar system, racing through space with inconceivable velocity, will one day enter a region charged with something deleterious to the human brain, minding us all mad-wise.

I do not like this idea that we have begun to kill off—at great velocity and accelerating speed—all of the things that sustain us. I didn’t like it at all when I first thought of it, but most people around me do not seem that disturbed by it, even though the knowledge of this is obvious and readily available to anyone who looks up trees on the Internet. At least, no one seems bothered, because no one has taken action to amend it. So they must not care. That is the only explanation I can think of for the lack of reaction to this fact.

The event horizon is the point at which the speed required to leave the vicinity of the black hole (the escape velocity) is the speed of light, and because Einstein’s theory tells us that no material object can reach that speed, nothing can escape from within the event horizon.

A measure of the strength of a body's gravity is the speed with which a projectile must be fired to escape its grasp. It takes 11.2 kilometers per second to escape from the Earth. This speed is tiny compared with that of light, 300,000 kilometers per second, but it challenges rocket engineers constrained to use chemical fuel, which converts only a billionth of its so-called mass 'rest-mass energy' (Einstein's mc^2) into effective power. The escape velocity from the sun's surface is 600 kilometers per second-still only one fifth of one percent of the speed of light.

The special theory of relativity that Einstein developed in 1905 applies only to this special case (hence the name): a situation in which the observers are moving at a constant velocity relative to one another—uniformly in a straight line at a steady speed—referred to as an “inertial reference system.

But this result [that light would travel faster towards a moving observer] comes into conflict with the principle of relativity [the laws of physics are the same for all observers]", Einstein added. "For, like every other general law of nature, the law of the transmission of light must, according to the principle of relativity, be the same when the railway carriage is the reference body as it is when the enbamkment is the refernece body". [...] There should be no experiment you can do, including measuring the speed of light, to distinguish which inertial frame of refence is "at rest" and which is moving at a constant velocity.

Finally, in 1905, he found the answer. His name was Albert Einstein, and his theory was called special relativity. He discovered that you cannot outrace a lightbeam, because the speed of light is the ultimate velocity in the universe. If you approach it, strange things happen. Your rocket becomes heavier, and time slows down inside it. If you were to somehow reach light speed, you would be infinitely heavy and time would stop. Both conditions are impossible, which means you cannot break the light barrier. Einstein became the cop on the block, setting the ultimate speed limit in the universe. This barrier has bedeviled generations of rocket scientists ever since.

Beyond a critical speed, no one can save time without forcing another to lose it. The man who claims a seat in a faster vehicle insists that his time is worth more than that of the passenger in a slower one. Beyond a certain velocity, passengers become consumers of other people’s time, and accelerating vehicles become the means for effecting a net transfer of life-time.

Newton had invented the calculus, which was expressed in the language of "differential equations," which describe how objects smoothly undergo infinitesimal changes in space and time. The motion of ocean waves, fluids, gases, and cannon balls could all be expressed in the language of differential equations. Maxwell set out with a clear goal, to express the revolutionary findings of Faraday and his force fields through precise differential equations. Maxwell began with Faraday's discovery that electric fields could turn into magnetic fields and vice versa. He took Faraday's depictions of force fields and rewrote them in the precise language of differential equations, producing one of the most important series of equations in modern science. They are a series of eight fierce-looking differential equations. Every physicist and engineer in the world has to sweat over them when mastering electromagnetism in graduate school. Next, Maxwell asked himself the fateful question: if magnetic fields can turn into electric fields and vice versa, what happens if they are constantly turning into each other in a never-ending pattern? Maxwell found that these electric-magnetic fields would create a wave, much like an ocean wave. To his astonishment, he calculated the speed of these waves and found it to be the speed of light! In 1864, upon discovering this fact, he wrote prophetically: "This velocity is so nearly that of light that it seems we have strong reason to conclude that light itself...is an electromagnetic disturbance.

The sphere to end all spheres—the largest and most perfect of them all—is the entire observable universe. In every direction we look, galaxies recede from us at speeds proportional to their distance. As we saw in the first few chapters, this is the famous signature of an expanding universe, discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929. When you combine Einstein’s relativity and the velocity of light and the expanding universe and the spatial dilution of mass and energy as a consequence of that expansion, there is a distance in every direction from us where the recession velocity for a galaxy equals the speed of light. At this distance and beyond, light from all luminous objects loses all its energy before reaching us. The universe beyond this spherical “edge” is thus rendered invisible and, as far as we know, unknowable. There’s a variation of the ever-popular multiverse idea in which the multiple universes that comprise it are not separate universes entirely, but isolated, non-interacting pockets of space within one continuous fabric of space-time—like multiple ships at sea, far enough away from one another so that their circular horizons do not intersect. As far as any one ship is concerned (without further data), it’s the only ship on the ocean, yet they all share the same body of water.

The official record for the fastest manmade object is the Helios 2 probe, which reached about 70 km/s in a close swing around the Sun. But it’s possible the actual holder of that title is a two-ton metal manhole cover. The cover sat atop a shaft at an underground nuclear test site operated by Los Alamos as part of Operation Plumbbob. When the 1-kiloton nuke went off below, the facility effectively became a nuclear potato cannon, giving the cap a gigantic kick. A high-speed camera trained on the lid caught only one frame of it moving upward before it vanished—which means it was moving at a minimum of 66 km/s. The cap was never found. Now, 66 km/s is about six times escape velocity, but contrary to common speculation, it’s unlikely the cap ever reached space. Newton’s impact depth approximation suggests that it was either destroyed completely by impact with the air or slowed and fell back to Earth. When we turn it back on, our reactivated hair dryer box, bobbing in lake water, undergoes a similar process. The heated steam below it expands outward, and as the box rises into the air, the entire surface of the lake turns to steam. The steam, heated to a plasma by the flood of radiation, accelerates the box faster and faster. Photo courtesy of Commander Hadfield Rather than slam into the atmosphere like the manhole cover, the box flies through a bubble of expanding plasma that offers little resistance. It exits the atmosphere and continues away, slowly fading from second sun to dim star. Much of the Northwest Territories is burning, but the Earth has survived.

The speed of business is moving at a velocity never before seen in human history. Knowledge workers can no longer accept that the business skills they acquired in high school and college will be enough of a foundation for the rest of their careers. In our research, even the best universities in the world fall far short on their undergraduate and MBA curricula for teaching modern social business principles. When we last checked, only a handful offered classes that taught even the most rudimentary social and mobile business strategies.

U.S. launch vehicles are these days too feeble to get such a spacecraft to Jupiter and beyond in only a few years by rocket propulsion alone. But if we’re clever (and lucky), there’s something else we can do: We can (as Galileo also did, years later) fly close to one world, and have its gravity fling us on to the next. A gravity assist, it’s called. It costs us almost nothing but ingenuity. It’s something like grabbing hold of a post on a moving merry-go-round as it passes—to speed you up and fling you in some new direction. The spacecraft’s acceleration is compensated for by a deceleration in the planet’s orbital motion around the Sun. But because the planet is so massive compared to the spacecraft, it slows down hardly at all. Each Voyager spacecraft picked up a velocity boost of nearly 40,000 miles per hour from Jupiter’s gravity. Jupiter in turn was slowed down in its motion around the Sun. By how much? Five billion years from now, when our Sun becomes a swollen red giant, Jupiter will be one millimeter short of where it would have been had Voyager not flown by it in the late twentieth century.

If the world is to be understood, if we are to avoid such logical paradoxes when traveling at high speeds, there are some rules, commandments of Nature, that must be obeyed. Einstein codified these rules in the special theory of relativity. Light (reflected or emitted) from an object travels at the same velocity whether the object is moving or stationary: Thou shalt not add thy speed to the speed of light. Also, no material object may move faster than light: Thou shalt not travel at or beyond the speed of light. Nothing in physics prevents you from traveling as close to the speed of light as you like; 99.9 percent of the speed of light would be just fine. But no matter how hard you try, you can never gain that last decimal point. For the world to be logically consistent, there must be a cosmic speed limit. Otherwise, you could get to any speed you wanted by adding velocities on a moving platform.

The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, it has been found that there are apparent exceptions to most of these laws, and this is particularly true when the observations are pushed to a limit, i.e., whenever the circumstances of experiment are such that extreme cases can be examined. Such examination almost surely leads, not to the overthrow of the law, but to the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions. As instances of such discoveries, which are in most cases due to the increasing order of accuracy made possible by improvements in measuring instruments, may be mentioned: first, the departure of actual gases from the simple laws of the so-called perfect gas, one of the practical results being the liquefaction of air and all known gases; second, the discovery of the velocity of light by astronomical means, depending on the accuracy of telescopes and of astronomical clocks; third, the determination of distances of stars and the orbits of double stars, which depend on measurements of the order of accuracy of one-tenth of a second-an angle which may be represented as that which a pin's head subtends at a distance of a mile. But perhaps the most striking of such instances are the discovery of a new planet or observations of the small irregularities noticed by Leverrier in the motions of the planet Uranus, and the more recent brilliant discovery by Lord Rayleigh of a new element in the atmosphere through the minute but unexplained anomalies found in weighing a given volume of nitrogen. Many other instances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that 'our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.

The phrase “slow reading” goes back at least as far as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who in 1887 described himself as a “teacher of slow reading.” The way he phrased it, you know he thought he was bucking the tide. That makes sense, because the modern world, i.e., a world built upon the concept that fast is good and faster is better, was just getting up a full head of steam. In the century and a quarter since he wrote, we have seen the world fall in love with speed in all its guises, including reading—part of President John F. Kennedy’s legend was his ability to speed read through four or five newspapers every morning. And this was all long before computers became household gadgets and our BFFs. Now and then the Nietzsches of the world have fought back. Exponents of New Criticism captured the flag in the halls of academe around the middle of the last century and made “close reading” all the rage. Then came Slow Food, then Slow Travel, then Slow Money. And now there is Slow Reading. In all these initiatives, people have fought against the velocity of modern life by doing … less and doing it slower.

Arthur tried to gauge the speed at which they were traveling, but the blackness outside was absolute and he was denied any reference points. The sense of motion was so soft and slight he could almost believe they were hardly moving at all. Then a tiny glow of light appeared in the far distance and within seconds had grown so much in size that Arthur realized it was traveling toward them at a colossal speed, and he tried to make out what sort of craft it might be. He peered at it, but was unable to discern any clear shape, and suddenly gasped in alarm as the aircar dipped sharply and headed downward in what seemed certain to be a collision course. Their relative velocity seemed unbelievable, and Arthur had hardly time to draw breath before it was all over. The next thing he was aware of was an insane silver blur that seemed to surround him. He twisted his head sharply round and saw a small black point dwindling rapidly in the distance behind them, and it took him several seconds to realize what had happened. They had plunged into a tunnel in the ground. The colossal speed had been their own, relative to the glow of light which was a stationary hole in the ground, the mouth of the tunnel. The insane blur of silver was the circular wall of the tunnel down which they were shooting, apparently at several hundred miles an hour. He closed his eyes in terror. After a length of time which he made no attempt to judge, he sensed a slight subsidence in their speed and some while later became aware that they were gradually gliding to a gentle halt. He opened his eyes again. They were still in the silver tunnel, threading and weaving their way through what appeared to be a crisscross warren of converging tunnels. When they finally stopped it was in a small chamber of curved steel. Several tunnels also had their termini here, and at the farther end of the chamber Arthur could see a large circle of dim irritating light. It was irritating because it played tricks with the eyes, it was impossible to focus on it properly or tell how near or far it was. Arthur guessed (quite wrongly) that it might be ultraviolet. Slartibartfast turned and regarded Arthur with his solemn old eyes. “Earthman,” he said, “we are now deep in the heart of Magrathea.

In this crucible of velocity, while feeling vulnerable and helpless to control your world of thoughts and images, you may discover a certain softness, an almost abstract tenderness toward everything and everyone. With that comes a moment of relief and of physical and mental relaxation. It is a feeling of sympathy and warmth toward everything outside of yourself along with the dropping away of an intensified self-consciousness. You are hardly alone in having had this experience. Almost universally, the one in the second state calls it Love or Compassion. Michaux called it "Misericordia in wave forms." But remember, you are still living in the great speed, and this too can "run wild." For a moment, sometimes a flashing moment, it brings you out beyond yourself, transcending your mental turmoil. It first stirred in you when you realized that you could be neutral; you could accommodate both intense pain and pleasure without attachment, without preference. You now may find that you are capable of experiencing wonderfully compassionate urges, and that this, more than anything else, is nuclear to your being. If ever there is an antidote to madness, it is here, in an opening out.

Once again, he was deducing a theory from principles and postulates, not trying to explain the empirical data that experimental physicists studying cathode rays had begun to gather about the relation of mass to the velocity of particles. Coupling Maxwell’s theory with the relativity theory, he began (not surprisingly) with a thought experiment. He calculated the properties of two light pulses emitted in opposite directions by a body at rest. He then calculated the properties of these light pulses when observed from a moving frame of reference. From this he came up with equations regarding the relationship between speed and mass. The result was an elegant conclusion: mass and energy are different manifestations of the same thing. There is a fundamental interchangeability between the two. As he put it in his paper, “The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.” The formula he used to describe this relationship was also strikingly simple: “If a body emits the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass decreases by L/V 2.” Or, to express the same equation in a different manner: L=mV 2. Einstein used the letter L to represent energy until 1912, when he crossed it out in a manuscript and replaced it with the more common E. He also used V to represent the velocity of light, before changing to the more common c. So, using the letters that soon became standard, Einstein had come up with his memorable equation: E=mc2

One solution might be to liken the path of the light beam through a changing gravitational field to that of a line drawn on a sphere or on a surface that is warped. In such cases, the shortest line between two points is curved, a geodesic like a great arc or a great circle route on our globe. Perhaps the bending of light meant that the fabric of space, through which the light beam traveled, was curved by gravity. The shortest path through a region of space that is curved by gravity might seem quite different from the straight lines of Euclidean geometry. There was another clue that a new form of geometry might be needed. It became apparent to Einstein when he considered the case of a rotating disk. As a disk whirled around, its circumference would be contracted in the direction of its motion when observed from the reference frame of a person not rotating with it. The diameter of the circle, however, would not undergo any contraction. Thus, the ratio of the disk’s circumference to its diameter would no longer be given by pi. Euclidean geometry wouldn’t apply to such cases. Rotating motion is a form of acceleration, because at every moment a point on the rim is undergoing a change in direction, which means that its velocity (a combination of speed and direction) is undergoing a change. Because non-Euclidean geometry would be necessary to describe this type of acceleration, according to the equivalence principle, it would be needed for gravitation as well.

Lastly, he hit on the idea of transferring the observer's position into the centre of the world, and to examine the variations in angular velocity, regardless of distance, as seen from the sun. And lo! it worked. The results were even more gratifying than he had expected. Saturn, for instance, when farthest away from the sun, in its aphelion, moves at the rate of 106 seconds arc per day; when closest to the sun, and its speed is at maximum, at 135 seconds arc per day. The ratio between the two extreme velocities is 106 to 135, which only differs by two seconds from 4:5. - the major third. With similar, very small deviations (which were all perfectly explained away at the end), the ratio of Jupiter's slowest to its fastest motion is a minor third, Mars' the quint, and so forth. So much for each planet considered by itself. But when he compared the extreme angular velocities of pairs of different planets, the results were even marvellous: "At the first glance the Sun of Harmony broke in all its clarity through the clouds." The extreme values yield in fact the intervals of the complete scale. But not enough: if we start with the outermost planet, Saturn, in the aphelion, the scale will be in the major key; if we start with Saturn in the perihelion, it will be in the minor key. Lastly, if several planets are simultaneously at the extreme points of their respective orbits, the result is a motet where Saturn and Jupiter represent the bass, Mars the tenor, Earth and Venus the contralto, Mercury the soprano. On some occasions all six can be heard together:

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad shouted a FORCE battle cry and charged through the dust storm to intercept the Shrike before it covered the final thirty meters to where Sol Weintraub crouched next to Brawne Lamia. The Shrike paused, its head swiveling frictionlessly, red eyes gleaming. Kassad armed his assault rifle and moved down the slope with reckless speed. The Shrike shifted. Kassad saw its movement through time as a slow blur, noting even as he watched the Shrike that movement in the valley had ceased, sand hung motionless in the air, and the light from the glowing Tombs had taken on a thick, amberish quality. Kassad’s skinsuit was somehow shifting with the Shrike, following it through its movements through time. The creature’s head snapped up, attentive now, and its four arms extended like blades from a knife, fingers snapping open in sharp greeting. Kassad skidded to a halt ten meters from the thing and activated the assault rifle, slagging the sand beneath the Shrike in a full-power wide-beam burst. The Shrike glowed as its carapace and steel-sculpture legs reflected the hellish light beneath and around it. Then the three meters of monster began to sink as the sand bubbled into a lake of molten glass beneath it. Kassad shouted in triumph as he stepped closer, playing the widebeam on the Shrike and ground the way he had sprayed his friends with stolen irrigation hoses in the Tharsis slums as a boy. The Shrike sank. Its arms splayed at the sand and rock, trying to find purchase. Sparks flew. It shifted, time running backward like a reversed holie, but Kassad shifted with it, realizing that Moneta was helping him, her suit slaved to his but guiding him through time, and then he was spraying the creature again with concentrated heat greater than the surface of a sun, melting sand beneath it, and watching the rocks around it burst into flame. Sinking in this cauldron of flame and molten rock, the Shrike threw back its head, opened its wide crevasse of a mouth, and bellowed. Kassad almost stopped firing in his shock at hearing noise from the thing. The Shrike’s scream resounded like a dragon’s roar mixed with the blast of a fusion rocket. The screech set Kassad’s teeth on edge, vibrated from the cliff walls, and tumbled suspended dust to the ground. Kassad switched to high-velocity solid shot and fired ten thousand microfléchettes at the creature’s face.

So what was this reincarnated ether, and what did it mean for Mach’s principle and for the question raised by Newton’s bucket?* Einstein had initially enthused that general relativity explained rotation as being simply a motion relative to other objects in space, just as Mach had argued. In other words, if you were inside a bucket that was dangling in empty space, with no other objects in the universe, there would be no way to tell if you were spinning or not. Einstein even wrote to Mach saying he should be pleased that his principle was supported by general relativity. Einstein had asserted this claim in a letter to Schwarzschild, the brilliant young scientist who had written to him from Germany’s Russian front during the war about the cosmological implications of general relativity. “Inertia is simply an interaction between masses, not an effect in which ‘space’ of itself is involved, separate from the observed mass,” Einstein had declared.23 But Schwarzschild disagreed with that assessment. And now, four years later, Einstein had changed his mind. In his Leiden speech, unlike in his 1916 interpretation of general relativity, Einstein accepted that his gravitational field theory implied that empty space had physical qualities. The mechanical behavior of an object hovering in empty space, like Newton’s bucket, “depends not only on relative velocities but also on its state of rotation.” And that meant “space is endowed with physical qualities.” As he admitted outright, this meant that he was now abandoning Mach’s principle. Among other things, Mach’s idea that inertia is caused by the presence of all of the distant bodies in the universe implied that these bodies could instantly have an effect on an object, even though they were far apart. Einstein’s theory of relativity did not accept instant actions at a distance. Even gravity did not exert its force instantly, but only through changes in the gravitational field that obeyed the speed limit of light. “Inertial resistance to acceleration in relation to distant masses supposes action at a distance,” Einstein lectured. “Because the modern physicist does not accept such a thing as action at a distance, he comes back to the ether, which has to serve as medium for the effects of inertia.”24 It is an issue that still causes dispute, but Einstein seemed to believe, at least when he gave his Leiden lecture, that according to general relativity as he now saw it, the water in Newton’s bucket would be pushed up the walls even if it were spinning in a universe devoid of any other objects. “In contradiction to what Mach would have predicted,” Brian Greene writes, “even in an otherwise empty universe, you will feel pressed against the inner wall of the spinning bucket… In general relativity, empty spacetime provides a benchmark for accelerated motion.

Boyd got the idea for “O-O-D-A” loops (he used dashes indicate that the steps are not distinct, but flow into each other) from observing the effects of jerky, unexpected, and abrupt maneuvers in air-to-air combat. After deciding that it was his quick OODA loops that allowed him to fight this way, Boyd defined “agility” in these terms: A side in a conflict or competition is more agile than its opponent if it can execute its OODA loops more quickly. This generalizes the term agility from air-to-air combat and from warfare in general. It also turns out to be equivalent to the definition floated in chapter II, the ability to rapidly change one’s orientation, since it is orientation locking up under the stress of competition and conflict that causes OODA loops to slow and makes one predictable, rather than abrupt and unpredictable. Speed, that is physical velocity, may provide an important tactical option, but it is not The Way.77 In fact, speed increases momentum, which can make one more predictable.

Excitement is usually associated with high speeds, but in reality, it is never the speed that gives us the exhilarating sensation of extreme motion. We simply don't have the ability to feel speed. You could be traveling at velocities close to the speed of light and you wouldn't feel a thing. What we are able to feel however is acceleration, the change in speed.

Brennan’s contribution to The Wedding Night (March 8, 1935), starring Gary Cooper and Anna Sten—the Russian beauty Samuel Goldwyn was promoting as the next European import to rival Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich—was of a different order. The anxious producer, worried about Sten’s accent (even though she was playing a Polish American), began to take notice of Brennan in a seemingly forgettable role he nevertheless freshened with his rapid-fire delivery. Brennan is Bill Jenkins, a cackling Connecticut cab driver, spitting tobacco juice (actually licorice) and showing the tobacco fields to Tony Barrett (Gary Cooper), an alcoholic writer modeled on F. Scott Fitzgerald and trying to dry out in a country hideaway. Goldwyn had been much impressed with the velocity of dialogue in It Happened One Night (February 23, 1934) and wanted his actors to perform at the same screwball speed. Brennan manages this feat more deftly than the picture’s ostensible stars, although Cooper perks up when doing scenes with Brennan. Unfortunately Sten did not the have the same opportunity. “I never even met Anna Sten,” Brennan told biographer Carol Easton. When Jenkins drives up to deliver a telegram to Barrett, walking along the road, neither the writer nor Jenkins has a pencil to use to reply to Barrett’s wife, who wants him to return to the city. So Barrett simply gives a verbal response: “My work won’t let me. Love Tony.” Jenkins repeats the message twice to fix it in his mind, but as soon as he drives off the message gets garbled: “My love won’t work me.” He tries again: “My work won’t love me.” Not satisfied, he begins again: “My work won’t love me.” In frustration, he spits, and says, “Gosh, I’m losin’ my memory.” His role is inconsequential, and yet so necessary to the local color that director King Vidor works Brennan into a scene whenever he can. Brennan would have made his character even more authentic if Goldwyn had not complied with a request from the Breen Office, the enforcers of the Production Code, that Brennan’s use of “damn” and “hell” be cut from the film.

I accordingly turned her over upon the quarter, and was in the act of nailing on the canvass, when I observed a very large spermaceti whale, as well as I could judge, about eighty-five feet in length; he broke water about twenty rods off our weather-bow, and was lying quietly, with his head in a direction for the ship. He spouted two or three times, and then disappeared. In less than two or three seconds he came up again, about the length of the ship off, and made directly for us, at the rate of about three knots. The ship was then going with about the same velocity. His appearance and attitude gave us at first no alarm; but while I stood watching his movements, and observing him but a ship’s length off, com- ing down for us with great celerity, I involuntarily ordered the boy at the helm to put it hard up; intending to sheer off and avoid him. The words were scarcely out of my mouth, before he came down upon us with full speed, and struck the ship with his head, just forward of the fore-chains; he gave us such an appalling and tremendous jar, as nearly threw us all on our faces. The ship brought up as suddenly and violently as if she had struck a rock and trembled for a few seconds like a leaf. We looked at each other with perfect amazement, deprived almost of the power of speech. Many minutes elapsed before we were able to realize the dreadful accident; during which time he passed under the ship, grazing her keel as he went along, came up underside of her to leeward, and lay on the top of the water (apparently stunned with the violence of the blow), for the space of a minute; he then suddenly started off, in a direction to leeward.

The official record for the fastest manmade object is the Helios 2 probe, which reached about 70 km/s in a close swing around the Sun. But it’s possible the actual holder of that title is a two-ton metal manhole cover. The cover sat atop a shaft at an underground nuclear test site operated by Los Alamos as part of Operation Plumbbob. When the 1-kiloton nuke went off below, the facility effectively became a nuclear potato cannon, giving the cap a gigantic kick. A high-speed camera trained on the lid caught only one frame of it moving upward before it vanished—which means it was moving at a minimum of 66 km/s. The cap was never found. Now, 66 km/s is about six times escape velocity, but contrary to common speculation, it’s unlikely the cap ever reached space. Newton’s impact depth approximation suggests that it was either destroyed completely by impact with the air or slowed and fell back to Earth.

The velocities they were traveling at were amazing, and if they met so much as a pebble at this speed it would hit them like cannon shell, driving a neat hole through vessel from bow to stern.

Even when one restricts the notion of progress to conquering space and time, its human limitations are flagrant. Take one of Buckminster Fuller's favorite illustrations of the shrinkage of time and space, beginning with a sphere twenty feet in diameter, to represent transportation time-distance by walking. With the use of the horse, this sphere gets reduced in size to six feet, with the clipper ship, it becomes a basketball, with the railroad, a baseball, with the jet plane, a marble, and with the rocket, a pea. And if one could travel at the speed of light, one might add, to round off Fuller's idea, the earth would become, from the standpoint of bodily velocity, a molecule, so that one would be back at the starting point without having even the briefest sensation of having left. By so carrying Fuller's illustration to its theoretic extreme, one reduces this mechanical concept to its proper degree of human irrelevance. For like every other technical achievement, speed has a meaning only in relation to other human needs and purposes. Plainly, the effect of speeding transportation is to diminish the possibilities of direct human experience-even the experience of travel. A person who undertook to walk around the earth would actually, at the end of that long journey, have stored up rich memories of its geographic, climatic, esthetic, and human realities: these experiences retreat in direct ratio to speed, until at the climax of rapid movement, the traveller can have no experience at all: his world has become a static one, in which time and motion work no changes whatever. Not merely space but man shrinks. Because of the volume of jet travel and the rapid turnover of tourists, this means of transport has already ruined beyond repair many of the precious historic sites and cities that incited this mass visitation.

if he maintained that speed and went outside, the ship would appear to him as if it wasn’t moving at all since he would be moving at the same velocity. But going outside at a high velocity was risky. He’d expose himself to gamma radiation and the threat of micrometeoroids. Getting hit by a tiny rock particle would likely be fatal. Victor couldn’t take that risk. Not with so much at stake. It would

The Germans had a family of three main battle tanks. The Mark IV, which received its first real combat test in May 1940, weighed twenty-seven tons, had somewhat less armor than the Sherman, about the same maximum road speed, and a tank gun comparable in weight of projectile and muzzle velocity to the 76-mm. American tank gun but superior to the short-barreled 75-mm. The Panther, Mark V, had proved itself during 1944 but still was subject to mechanical failures which were well recognized but which seemingly could not be corrected in the hasty German production schedules. This tank had a weight of fifty tons, a superiority in base armor of one-half to one inch over the Sherman, good mobility and flotation, greater speed, and a high-velocity gun superior even to the new American 76-mm. tank gun. The Tiger, Mark VI, had been developed as an answer to the heavy Russian tank but had encountered numerous production difficulties (it had over 26,000 parts) and never reached the field in the numbers Hitler desired. The original model weighed fifty-four tons, had thicker armor than the Panther, including heavy top armor as protection against air attack, was capable of a speed comparable to the Sherman, and mounted a high-velocity 88-mm. cannon. A still heavier Mark VI, the King Tiger, had an added two to four inches of armor plate. Few of this model ever reached the Ardennes, although it was commonly reported by American troops. Exact figures on German tank strength are not available, but it would appear that of the estimated 1,800 panzers in the Ardennes battle some 250 were Tigers and the balance was divided equally between the Mark IV and the Panther. Battle experience in France, which was confirmed in the Ardennes, gave the Sherman the edge over the Mark IV in frontal, flank, and rear attack. The Panther often had been beaten by the Sherman during the campaign in France, and would be defeated on the Ardennes battleground, but in nearly all cases of a forthright tank engagement the Panther lost only when American numerical superiority permitted an M4 to get a shot at flank or tail. Insofar as the Tiger was concerned, the Sherman had to get off a lucky round or the result would be strictly no contest.

There's a good general reason to expect that physical theories consistent with special relativity will have to be field theories. Here it comes: A major result of the special theory of relativity is that there is a limiting velocity: the speed of light, usually denoted c. The influence of one particle on another cannot be transmitted faster than that. Newton's law for the gravitational force, according to which the force due to a distant body is proportional to the inverse square of its distance right now, does not obey that rule, so it is not consistent with special relativity. Indeed the concept "right now" itself is problematic. Events that appear simultaneous to a stationary observer will not appear simultaneous to an observer moving at constant velocity. Overthrowing the concept of a universal "now" was, according to Einstein himself, by far the most difficult step in arriving at special relativity: [A]ll attempts to clarify this paradox satisfactorily were condemned to failure as long as the axiom of the absolute character of times, viz., of simultaneity, unrecognizedly was anchored in the unconscious. Clearly to recognize this axiom and its arbitrary character really implies already the solution of the problem.

How much energy will it take to propel a spaceship to ultra-high speeds? To keep things easy to visualize, we are going to calculate the energy needed to propel a one-pound object to 50% of the speed of light. The formula to determine this is: Kinetic Energy = 1/2 (mass) (velocity) (velocity) To propel an object that weighs one pound to a velocity 50% of the speed of light would require an energy source equal to the energy of 98 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. That's a tremendous amount of energy.[24]

The next point was made by Newton, who discussed the question: ‘When it does not go in a straight line then what?’ And he answered it this way: that a force is needed to change the velocity in any manner. For instance, if you are pushing a ball in the direction that it moves it will speed up. If you find that it changes direction, then the force must have been sideways. The force can be measured by the product of two effects. How much does the velocity change in a small interval of time? That’s called the acceleration, and when it is multiplied by the coefficient called the mass of an object, or its inertia coefficient, then that together is the force. One can measure this.

two of the main factors that drive economic growth are the availability of money—the stockpiles we can draw upon—and the velocity of money, or the speed and ease with which we can move that money around.

it has now been demonstrated that pigeons can generate internal representations of moving visual stimuli, and can use these representations to solve problems when the visual stimuli are temporarily out of sight. This was achieved by using a video image of a rotating, constant-velocity clock hand as the cue, and requiring test animals to respond to the internally imaged speed of the clock hand during periods when the video display was briefly turned off. Pigeons that were able to accurately keep the temporal progression of such an image in mind could obtain food by responding appropriately in a timely manner. Pigeons acquired such tasks remarkably well, and a host of control manipulations indicated that the pigeons were in fact responding to sustained internal representations of the visual displays within their brains.

we also began an initiative called Velocity Product Development (VPD) that reimagined virtually every part of our development process with the goal of increasing sales. Working with our engineers and marketers, we analyzed the flow of projects through our system, identifying and fixing blockages with an eye toward improving speed. We took apart our development process step by step, improving everything about it—bringing marketing and engineering together from the very beginning, improving how usable our product designs were and how easy they were for our plants to manufacture, implementing rapid prototyping of our designs, and enhancing how we launched new products. We reduced the number of sign-offs new design changes required as they moved through the system, improved software development and testing, and enhanced our use of electronic design tools.

Speed, or more accurately velocity, which measures both speed and direction, matters in business. With all other things being equal, the organization that moves faster will innovate more, simply because it will be able to conduct a higher number of experiments per unit of time. Yet many companies find themselves struggling against their own bureaucratic drag, which appears in the form of layer upon layer of permission, ownership, and accountability, all working against fast, decisive forward progress.

I loved the chase. Even Riveaux’s insane driving. Not just the velocity but the violence of it all. I liked speeding through red lights. Headfirst to the edge. Scraping enough skin to burn not bleed. Sleuthing was impossible sometimes, a doomed quest. It was godly, really. A gorgeous curse. Like a plague of locusts. Like kissing a married woman.

…Somehow I had assumed that the past stood still, in perfected effigies of itself, and that what we had once possessed remained our possession forever, and that at least the past, our past, our childhood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve, did not deteriorate like the untended house of an aging mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in our remembrance. I see that this isn’t so, that memory decays like the rest, is unstable in its essence, flits, occludes, is variable, sidesteps, bleeds away, eludes all recovery; worse, is not that it seemed once, alters unfairly, is not the intact garden we remember but, instead, speeds away from us backward terrifically until when we pause to touch that sun-remembered wall the stones are friable, crack and soft down, and we could cry at the fierceness of that velocity if our astonished eyes had time.

Now that we’re sleeping together, I need him to check in with me regularly. Every day? Every hour? I’m not sure what exactly regularly means. Maybe Hank can devise a mathematical formula, like the one that measures the speed of terminal velocity, to assess how many phone calls it takes to satisfy my notion of regularly. It could be an SAT question. Something like, if x = most people and y = Elizabeth, which of the following four equations expresses the difference between normal need and Elizabeth’s need? Until someone comes up with an answer, all I know is that I feel desperate all the time.

Aging’s Escape Velocity and the Rabbit Imagine a sign far off in the future with a number on it that represents the age of your death. Every year that you live, you advance closer to the sign. When you reach the sign, you die. Now imagine a rabbit holding the sign and walking to the future. Every year that you live, the rabbit is half a year as far away. After a while, you will reach the rabbit and die. But what if the rabbit could walk at a pace of one year for every year of your life? You would never be able to catch the rabbit, and therefore you would never die. The speed at which the rabbit walks to the future is our technology. The more we advance technology and knowledge of our bodies, the faster we can make the rabbit walk. Aging’s escape velocity is the moment at which the rabbit walks at a pace of one year per year or faster, and we become immortal.

Working Together Composed by David Whyte as a dedication to the 777 at the request of Boeing corporation. Whyte wanted to be sure not to write a corporate propaganda piece and hence he drew upon his own fear of flying to write something very meaningful. The idea of travelling 550 miles per hour at 33,000 feet with no visible means of support can be scary. However, we today know that the plane gets its support from the interaction between velocity and the wing shape. Velocity and the aerodynamic shape have existed in nature since time immemorial, but humans only discovered the power of bringing them together only about 140 years. That discovery has allowed us to travel all over the world today. Using this as a metaphor, he wrote about many hidden qualities in ourselves that we may need to bring together to achieve more than we can imagine. We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible working together in common cause, to produce the miraculous. I am thinking of the way the intangible air traveled at speed round a shaped wing easily holds our weight. So may we, in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine, and look for the true shape of our own self, by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.

Do you know the difference between speed vs velocity? Velocity is motion in one direction. So speed is only effective if you are running in the right direction. Direction is much more important than speed.

the peregrine falls through the sky, gaining more and more velocity until its speed reaches more than two hundred miles an hour. It is the fastest creature on earth,

Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business—plus a high-velocity decision-making environment is more fun too. We don’t know all the answers, but here are some thoughts.

Why Do the Silent Winds Howl? by Maisie Aletha Smikle Winds gallop In velocity Velocity you can detect Velocity which other than the object being moved by the force of the air You cannot see neither can you touch Knots faster than the speed of light Churn in unified force To push everything except Mountains and lands out of sight The silent air of the wind moves Forcing and gushing through holes and crevices And hastens to vacuum plateaus Plains valleys meadows and sandy deserts Taking chattels fossils Structures and trees Anything its forces can carry Upon the wind arrival and contact with land and objects Nature sends off a howl or whistle Bringing all species to full attention As the silent wind moves With forces stronger than a million battalion No force can withstand such a force Neither air force space force Land force sea force or nuclear force All forces flee from the forces of this force Nature whistles Nature howls Nature pleads Stay away species stay away Else you'll be carried like fossils and pieces of species by the silent wind That says neither hello nor goodbye

One of the clichéd human answers to stress and overwork is to increase your speed and your velocity… The great tragedy of this approach is that you cannot recognize anything or anyone who is not traveling at the same velocity you are and you become a stranger to the slower, longer cycles of existence … and you find it hard to have compassion for anyone [at a slower pace] … you are afraid of stopping and they are reminding you that there is a part of the world that does periodically stops and takes a breath before it moves again. You don’t know who you’d be if you stopped and you get quite resentful … a kind of existential impatience and lack of generosity which comes from stressful approach to work.

Prostate cancer screening provides an even better example. It’s no longer as simple as “Your PSA number is X or higher, and therefore we must biopsy your prostate, a painful procedure with many unpleasant possible side effects.” Now we know to look at other parameters, such as PSA velocity (the speed at which PSA has been changing over time), PSA density (PSA value normalized to the volume of the prostate gland), and free PSA (comparing the amount of PSA that is bound versus unbound to carrier proteins in the blood). When those factors are taken into account, PSA becomes a much better indicator of prostate cancer risk.

Relativity asserts that all observers, whatever their velocities relative to one another, measure exactly the same number for the speed of light. The invariance of the speed of light allows two apparently unrelated quantities, the dimension of time and the three dimensions of space, to be united into one four-dimensional entity, spacetime.

The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business—plus a high-velocity decision-making environment is more fun too.

potentials is accelerated by their strong myelination. Myelin insulation not only speeds up spike transmission velocity but also protects axons from conduction failure, reduces the cross-talk from neighboring axons, and allows for transmission of much higher frequency pulses per unit time than thinner, unmyelinated fibers.

At speeds up to about 300 mph air can be regarded as incompressible, like water. In other words, the pressure differences caused by the air velocities are small compared with the pressure of the atmosphere, and so the air behaves as if its density remained constant. For example, at 200 mph the maximum pressure that air can exert is only 5 percent of the atmospheric pressure, which has a negligible effect on the air density and the flow. But at 400 mph the pressure increases to 21 per cent and at 600 mph to 51 per cent. These pressure increases have a significant effect upon the density of the air, and, hence, upon its flow pattern and the forces that the air exerts.

The principle of relativity rests on a simple fact: Whenever we discuss speed or velocity (an object's speed and its direction of motion), we must specify precisely who or what is doing the measuring.

Even as PayPal was zooming out of the gate, there was no point at which the company could rest easy. Escape velocity is not a fixed speed. It’s always relative to competition. Your fastest competitor determines how hard you hit the gas. And PayPal had a fierce competitor in eBay, which was itself rolling out a new online payment system.

When two people fall in love with each other, the laws of physics seem not to apply. There are no rules on velocity or speed - it just happens as it does.

Take the case (to use an easy example) of a river, carrying boats and communicating to them its own velocity, yet limited by their own inertia so that, all the rest being equal, the more heavily loaded will be carried more slowly. Hence it can be stated that the speed of the boats comes from the river, the slowness, from the load; the positive, from the force of the propelling agent, the privative, from the inertia of the propelled. Quite in the same manner it may be said that God contributes to the creatures their perfections, yet is limited by their receptivity. Thus all goods are due to the divine force; the evils, to the torpor of the creature.

down instead of from Twenty-Third Street looking up—things look quite a bit different. From that angle, the annoyed, hustling and bustling, highly important people angling their way through the obstacle course of onlookers seem insignificant. Our sun and moon and eight planets are just one little neighborhood among an estimated 200 billion neighborhoods that make up our universe.19 If we think of the Milky Way galaxy as being the size of the entire continent of North America, our solar system would fit into a coffee cup.20 Two Voyager spacecrafts are cruising toward the edge of the solar system at a rate of more than 35,000 miles per hour. They’ve been doing that for more than forty years and have traveled more than 11 billion miles, with no end in sight.21 When NASA sends communication to one of those Voyagers traveling at that velocity, it takes about seventeen hours to get there.22 That data has led scientists to estimate that to send a “speed of light” message to the edge of the universe would take more than 15 billion years to arrive.23 “So, yes, Chelsea art dealer, you are very important. But when we think about what we’re all gazing at while you make your agitation known through grunts and mumbles, you’re also impossibly young, urgently expiring, and unbelievably small.” You and I see the world with our own two eyes, and from that minuscule perspective, we tend to convince ourselves that we are (or at least should be) in control, directing our own lives, and scripting our future. We come back again to the truth that Philip Yancey reminded us of earlier in the chapter: “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.” God is the one who calls us to “be still, and know that I am God.” Psalm 8 marvels at this very wonder:

Science is filled with claims that cannot be empirically falsified or verified. A great example would be in the special theory of relativity. The claim that the one-way speed of light is constant is unfalsifiable because we can only measure the round-trip velocity of light. You can send a light signal out and then have it bounce back from a mirror or something to the source and measure the round-trip velocity – how long did it take for the light signal to go out and come back? And that is constant. The light signal always travels at the same velocity in a round-trip. But we can't measure the one-way velocity of light. Theoretically, it's possible that light goes out at one velocity and then comes back at a different one, and we'd never be able to tell. And yet obviously this is part of a scientific theory that's part of the foundations of physics today. And there are many other principles of that sort.

The nearest approach to such a new drug - and how immeasurably remote it is from the ideal intoxicant! - is the drug of speed. Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure. True, men have always enjoyed speed; but their enjoyment has been limited, until very recent times, by the capacities of the horse, whose maximum velocity is not much more than thirty miles an hour. Now thirty miles an hour on a horse feels very much faster than sixty miles an hour in a train or a hundred in an aeroplane. The train is too large and steady, the aeroplane too remote from stationary surroundings, to give the passengers a very intense sensation of speed. The automobile is sufficiently small and sufficiently near the ground to be able to compete, as an intoxicating speed-purveyor, with the galloping horse. The inebriating effects of speed are noticeable, on horseback, at about twenty miles an hour, in a car at about sixty. When the car has passed seventy-two, or thereabouts, one begins to feel an unprecedented sensation - a sensation which no man in the days of horses ever felt. It grows intenser with every increase of velocity. I myself have never travelled at much more than eighty miles an hour in a car; but those who have drunk a stronger brewage of this strange intoxicant tell me that new marvels await anyone who has the opportunity of passing the hundred mark. At what point the pleasure turns into pain, I do not know. Long before the fantastic Daytona figures are reached, at any rate. Two hundred miles an hour must be absolute torture.

And while I say so much about the Holy Ghost today, I withdraw everything that doesn’t put Jesus in the ordered place He belongs, for when I speak about the Holy Ghost it is always with reference to revelations of Jesus. The Holy Ghost is only the revealer of the mighty Christ who has all for us that we may never know any weakness but all limitations are gone. You are now in a place where God has taken the ideal and moved you on with His own velocity, which has a speed beyond all human mind and thought. Glory to God!

Place has ceased to be of importance now that power no longer lives at a fixed address. ... Power's location is less important than its velocity through temporary obstacles. The speed of a tank ramming through the baricade of history.

Galileo found that a ball rolling down an incline acquires just enough velocity to return it to the same vertical height on a second incline of any slope, and he learned to see that experimental situation as like the pendulum with a point-mass for a bob. Huyghens then solved the problem of the center of oscillation of a physical pendulum by imagining that the extended body of the latter was composed of Galilean point-pendula, the bonds between which could be instantaneously released at any point in the swing. After the bonds were released, the individual point-pendula would swing freely, but their collective center of gravity when each attained its highest point would, like that of Galileo's pendulum, rise only to the height from which the center of gravity of the extended pendulum had begun to fall. Finally, Daniel Bernoulli discovered how to make the flow of water from an orifice resemble Huyghens' pendulum. Determine the descent of the center of gravity of the water in tank and jet during an infinitesimal interval of time. Next imagine that each particle of water afterward moves separately upward to the maximum height attainable with the velocity acquired during that interval. The ascent of the center of gravity of the individual particles must then equal the descent of the center of gravity of the water in tank and jet. From that view of the problem the long-sought speed of efflux followed at once. That example should begin to make clear what I mean by learning from problems to see situations as like each other, as subjects for the application of the same scientific law or law-sketch. Simultaneously it should show why I refer to the consequential knowledge of nature acquired while learning the similarity relationship and thereafter embodied in a way of viewing physical situations rather than in rules or laws. The three problems in the example, all of them exemplars for eighteenth-century mechanicians, deploy only one law of nature. Known as the Principle of vis viva, it was usually stated as: "Actual descent equals potential ascent." Bernoulli's application of the law should suggest how consequential it was. Yet the verbal statement of the law, taken by itself, is virtually impotent. Present it to a contemporary student of physics, who knows the words and can do all these problems but now employs different means. Then imagine what the words, though all well known, can have said to a man who did not know even the problems. For him the generalization could begin to function only when he learned to recognize "actual descents" and "potential ascents" as ingredients of nature, and that is to learn something, prior to the law, about the situations that nature does and does not present. That sort of learning is not acquired by exclusively verbal means. Rather it comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function in use; nature and words are learned together. TO borrow once more Michael Polanyi's useful phrase, what results from this process is "tacit knowledge" which is learned by doing science rather than by acquiring rules for doing it.

In the November 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reported on the special courts established around the country for the express purpose of streamlining and accelerating foreclosure actions. Presided over by retired judges who were unfamiliar with the complexities involved in the mortgage fraud, these courts were not set up “to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity.” The whole process was designed to transfer the property of ordinary citizens to the nation’s largest banks regardless of entitlement. As Taibbi wrote: The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville [Florida] judge, the Honorable A. C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes. The following month, the Washington Post reported that similar courts in Virginia were “making it easier for lenders to defend themselves when accused of giving homeowners too little warning of impending foreclosures.” Indeed, “the process moves so quickly in Virginia…that homeowners can receive less than two weeks’ notice that their house is about to be sold on the courthouse steps.” The design of the courts guaranteed that even banks with no legal foreclosure entitlement had an almost insurmountable advantage. In the very short time they were accorded, homeowners seeking to stop foreclosure had to “gather evidence, file a lawsuit and potentially post a bond with the court that could total thousands of dollars.” These arduous requirements, combined with the near-impossible deadlines, meant that many borrowers simply ran out of time when trying to fight invalid foreclosure proceedings. It

NOTHING CAN GO FASTER THAN LIGHT Of course the idea that there is an ultimate speed of light is very high by earthly standards, the magnitude is not the point; any kind of speed limit in nature doesn't make sense. Suppose, for example, that a spaceship is traveling at almost the speed of light. Why can't you fire the engine again and make it go faster-or if necessary, build another ship with a more powerful engine? Or if a proton is whirling around in a cyclotron at close to the speed of light, why can't you give it additional energy boosts and make it go faster? Intuitive explanation. When we think of the spaceship and the proton as made of fields, not as solid objects, the idea is no longer ridiculous. Fields can't move infinitely fast. Changes in a field propagate in a "laborious" manner, with a change in intensity at one point causing a change at nearby points, in accordance with the field equations. Consider the wave created when you drop a stone in water: The stone generates a disturbance that moves outward as the water level at one point affects the level at another point, and there is nothing we can do to speed it up. Or consider a sound wave traveling through air: The disturbance in air pressure propagates as the pressure at one point affects the pressure at an adjacent point, and we can't do anything to speed it up. In both cases the speed of travel is determined by properties of the transmitting medium- air and water, and there are mathematical equations that describe those properties. Fields are also described by mathematical equations, based on the properties of space. It is the constant c in those equations that determines the maximum speed of propagation. If the field has mass, there is also a mass term that slows down the propagation speed further. Since everything is made of fields - including protons and rocketships - it is clear that nothing can go faster than light. As Frank Wilczek wrote, One of the most basic results of special relativity, that the speed of light is a limiting velocity for the propagation of any physical influence, makes the field concept almost inevitable. - F. Wilczek ("The persistence of Ether", p. 11, Physics Today, Jan. 1999) David Bodanis tried to make this point in the following way: Light will always be a quick leapfrogging of electricity out from magnetism, and then of magnetism leaping out from electricity, all swiftly shooting away from anything trying to catch up to it. That's why it's speed can be an upper limit - D. Bodanis However, Bodanis only told part of the story. It is only when we recognize that everything, not just light, is made of fields that we can conclude that there is a universal speed limit.

NOTHING CAN GO FASTER THAN LIGHT Of course the idea that there is an ultimate speed limit seems absurd. While the speed of light is very high by earthly standards, the magnitude is not the point; any kind of speed limit in nature doesn't make sense. Suppose, for example, that a spaceship is traveling at almost the speed of light. Why can't you fire the engine again and make it go faster-or if necessary, build another ship with a more powerful engine? Or if a proton is whirling around in a cyclotron at close to the speed of light, why can't you give it additional energy boosts and make it go faster? Intuitive explanation. When we think of the spaceship and the proton as made of fields, not as solid objects, the idea is no longer ridiculous. Fields can't move infinitely fast. Changes in a field propagate in a "laborious" manner, with a change in intensity at one point causing a change at nearby points, in accordance with the field equations. Consider the wave created when you drop a stone in water: The stone generates a disturbance that moves outward as the water level at one point affects the level at another point, and there is nothing we can do to speed it up. Or consider a sound wave traveling through air: The disturbance in air pressure propagates as the pressure at one point affects the pressure at an adjacent point, and we can't do anything to speed it up. In both cases the speed of travel is determined by properties of the transmitting medium- air and water, and there are mathematical equations that describe those properties. Fields are also described by mathematical equations, based on the properties of space. It is the constant c in those equations that determines the maximum speed of propagation. If the field has mass, there is also a mass term that slows down the propagation speed further. Since everything is made of fields - including protons and rocketships - it is clear that nothing can go faster than light. As Frank Wilczek wrote, One of the most basic results of special relativity, that the speed of light is a limiting velocity for the propagation of any physical influence, makes the field concept almost inevitable. - F. Wilczek ("The persistence of Ether", p. 11, Physics Today, Jan. 1999) David Bodanis tried to make this point in the following way: Light will always be a quick leapfrogging of electricity out from magnetism, and then of magnetism leaping out from electricity, all swiftly shooting away from anything trying to catch up to it. That's why it's speed can be an upper limit - D. Bodanis However, Bodanis only told part of the story. It is only when we recognize that everything, not just light, is made of fields that we can conclude that there is a universal speed limit.

With these experiments, Galileo succeeded in unlocking the secret of uniformly accelerated motion. His theory was that the speed of an object increased the farther it fell, and, in addition, that the rate of increase was the same with each equal addition of distance. This was the phenomenon as Galileo described it: “A body is said to be uniformly accelerated when, starting from rest, it acquires equal increments of velocity during equal time intervals.

How can you trust a God Who took away your parents?” Her gaze fell. “This life isn’t perfect, and there are things that happen, bad things, set into motion by people who make really bad choices. God does not alter the physical laws of this world. If velocity says a car traveling at this speed hits another at that speed, there are consequences to that impact. God allows the laws here to work so that we can live our lives. Otherwise, if the law of gravity worked sometimes and not others, we couldn’t even walk out of our house because we might float off the planet.” She paused and then shook her head. “But there’s more to it than that. God can take anything, anything and use it to teach us, to strengthen us, to guide us—if we let Him.

He hit terminal velocity and kept accelerating, speed

The Great Pyramid of Giza does not only utter the numerical number of the speed of light through its latitudinal positioning, it even explicitly expresses the physical velocity per seas I have demonstrated.

Physicists have formulated equations that indicate exactly how much length contraction objects will experience and how slow time will progress relative to the stationary observer. These equations take into account the velocity of the observer. The faster the movement, the more space contraction and time dilation will occur. What is the limit of this process? What if people could go very, very fast? If they were actually able to go the speed of light, they would shrink to nothingness and time would totally stop for them. That is, they could not exist. This is yet another consequence of special relativity: there is a type of cosmic speed limit. Nothing can move as fast as, or faster than, the speed of light. This is, quite literally, a limitation described by science.