View single post by Joe Kelley
 Posted: Mon Oct 16th, 2006 05:15 pm
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Joe Kelley

 

Joined: Mon Nov 21st, 2005
Location: California USA
Posts: 6399
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http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=696

A forty-two minute gravity train route from New York City to HawaiiAbout four hundred years ago– sometime in the latter half of the 17th century– Isaac Newton received a letter from the brilliant British scientist and inventor Robert Hooke. In this letter, Hooke outlined the mathematics governing how objects might fall if dropped through hypothetical tunnels drilled through the Earth at varying angles. Though it seems that Hooke was mostly interested in the physics of the thought experiment, an improbable yet intriguing idea fell out of the data: a dizzyingly fast transportation system.