Comment on your mom falls significantly faster than g
roscoe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
This would make a good “What if?” For XKCD. In a frictionless vacuum with two spheres the mass of the earth and a bowling ball how far away do they need to start before the earth sized mass will move 1 Planck length before they come together?
Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
I actually thought the answer might be never, but a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests you can do this by dropping a ~1kg bowling ball from a height of 10^-11m.
This is an extremely rough calculation, I’m basically just looking at how big a bunch of numbers are and pushing all that through some approximate formulae. I could easily be off by a few orders of magnitude and frankly I didn’t take care to check I was even doing any of it correctly.
10^-11m seems wrong, and frankly it probably is. But that’s still 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times further than the earth moves in this situation.