Posted: 12/9/2005 3:11:13 AM EDT
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No doubt this has been asked before, maybe even by me a few million beers ago. If you bored a hole perfectly through the center of the earth and sleeved it so it would be a smooth tube all the way through and dropped a bowling ball into it what would happen? Would it's speed from the drop shoot it out the other side? Would it waver back and forth until it settled in the center? Would it be squashed in the center? Could we throw Hillary in to retrieve it? |
If the tube was lined with a material, currently uknown to man, that could withstand the ungodly pressure and not collapse on itself - I'd say that one. But due to varying gravitational forces from Earth's "wobble" and the moon, it would not sit perfectly still - I expect it would move back and forth in the tube several miles daily. But I'm just your average moron with an opinion. |
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You'd hafta poke Hitlery down the hole with a long stick....wich by the way, kinda sounds like a pretty good idea. I think your hypotheticl bowling ball would go almost all the way through when it would start back the other way. After about a jigillion passes, give or take a bajillion or two, it would settle in the center. I don't know diddly squat about physics or planetary gravity or anything at all. But I feel qualified to throw my internet opinion around. So...THERE. 
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Okay, a super strong tube surrounded by an all powerful force field given to us by the grey aliens who escaped area 51. |
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Assuming you could do that, and assuming we didn't all die from magnetic field collapse, the ball will not come anywhere near the other side. Drag from the air in the tube will mean that the ball only reaches its terminal velocity on the way to the center, where it will slow down pretty quickly. If the tube contained a vacuum, the ball would have no upper velocity limit, so it would come pretty close to the other side and would take a while to settle down in the middle, but you'd still see a bunch of lost velocity from the ball banging into the sides of the tube. |
| I think it'd just keep popping from one side of the earth to the other barring loss of energy from frictional or other forces. When you initially drop it, it has potential energy, when it falls, the energy is being converted to kinetic energy, as it passes the center, the process of converting from kinetic to potential energy kicks in, repeat ad naseum |
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