Sunday, 16 August 2009
Now I've mentioned before that the Back to the Future films are some of my all time favourite movies from when I was younger. Fortunately they have also stood the test of time quite well and so I still enjoy watching them -- hence I quite like the t-shirt designs. This isn't, however, a blog about t-shirts.
A long time ago (on a web page far back in my browser history) I read an article about how good a spaceship the time machine in the films would have to be just to cope with the distance travelled ignoring the time displacement. Because the Earth rotates on it's axis and moves around the sun, time travel at a fixed location (i.e. the Twin Pine Mall car park) involves not just figuring out how to travel through time but also how to move very fast to stay in the same place.
I won't go into all the maths (the article is a fun read so go read it) suffice to say that it would have to travel a lot faster than the heap of junk car that John DeLorean actually tried to sell!
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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