{"id":915,"date":"2006-12-12T20:50:20","date_gmt":"2006-12-12T20:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/12\/imagine-a-rocket-in-a-football\/"},"modified":"2006-12-12T20:50:20","modified_gmt":"2006-12-12T20:50:20","slug":"imagine-a-rocket-in-a-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/12\/imagine-a-rocket-in-a-football\/","title":{"rendered":"Imagine a Rocket in a Football Stadium Full of Jello&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>That damn airplane-on-a-treadmill problem has come up again, thanks to the <a href=\"http:\/\/pogue.blogs.nytimes.com\/2006\/12\/11\/the-airplane-treadmill-conundrum\/\"><cite>New York Times<\/cite><\/a>, aided and abetted by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2006\/12\/11\/airplanetreadmill_pr.html\">Boing Boing<\/a>. For some reason, this problem inevitably produces very heated responses, such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.giveupblog.com\/2006\/12\/stupid-hurts-my-brain.html\">this one<\/a>. It doesn&#8217;t help that the problem is frequently mis-stated to explicitly have the airplane stading still relative to the ground.<\/p>\n<p>The key question here is whether the plane moves relative to the ground (<strong>not<\/strong> the treadmill) or not&#8211; if it does, then the plane will eventually take off, and if it doesn&#8217;t, it won&#8217;t. The main source of confusion then seems to be what, exactly, the wheels are doing in this scenario.<\/p>\n<p>I tend to think that <a href=\"http:\/\/brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu\/~rknop\/blog\/?p=141\">Rob Knop has it right<\/a>, particularly when he says that it&#8217;s a stupid and badly-formed hypothetical. I really hate these sorts of problems&#8211; if you&#8217;re going to try to come up with physcis-based brain teasers, <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/02\/pop_quiz_hotshot.php\">keep it simple and elegant<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>And if you&#8217;re going to do silly things with treadmills, <a href=\"http:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=NINJQ5LRh-0\">set it to music<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That damn airplane-on-a-treadmill problem has come up again, thanks to the New York Times, aided and abetted by Boing Boing. For some reason, this problem inevitably produces very heated responses, such as this one. It doesn&#8217;t help that the problem is frequently mis-stated to explicitly have the airplane stading still relative to the ground. The&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/12\/imagine-a-rocket-in-a-football\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Imagine a Rocket in a Football Stadium Full of Jello&#8230;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}