The World According to Physics
by Jim Al-Khalili · 10 Mar 2020 · 198pp · 57,703 words
slower time runs. This effect has the strange consequence that time ticks by ever so slightly slower in the Earth’s core (deep within its gravitational well) than it does on the surface. This difference in age that has accumulated over the four and half billion years of our planet’s existence
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of them will disagree on the time interval between events. As before, their clocks will tick at different rates: being deeper within the Earth’s gravitational well, where there is more spacetime curvature, the Earth observer’s clock will tick more slowly. However, unlike in special relativity, the situation here is no
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the pull of gravity eventually clumped together to form stars and galaxies. The molecules of hydrogen and helium gas in space fell together into the gravitational wells of the stars, causing an increase in entropy as they did so. But, crucially, this entropy did not reach a maximum—stars are not systems
The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees · 18 Apr 2022 · 192pp · 63,813 words
Chapter 7, which examines multigenerational, self-contained ecosystems that could either orbit the sun or travel to the stars. FINDING THE ENERGY TO ESCAPE FROM GRAVITATIONAL WELLS Part of the challenge presented by travel through space depends, of course, on the distance to be covered. There is also a second, somewhat subtler
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factor: the depth of the “gravitational well” that inhibits escape from any sizable object. The concept of gravitational wells usefully connects with Einstein’s concept of space as a three-dimensional version of a two-dimensional sheet of fabric
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dimples or “wells.” Any spacecraft traveling from Earth must expend the energy needed to climb out of our planet’s gravitational well, plus additional energy to avoid falling too rapidly into the gravitational well at its destination. Deeper wells require more energy for escape, and more massive spacecraft likewise demand more energy than less
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massive ones do. We can attempt to describe the depth of an object’s gravitational well by specifying the energy with which a projectile of standard mass would have to be fired to escape from it completely. This number provides only
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course, no matter where the material goes. The single greatest impediment to spaceflight resides, all too literally, in the fuel required for escape from a gravitational well, either into orbit or (with still more fuel) onto an escape trajectory. Because chemical fuel provides an inefficient method for storing energy, any rocket must
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engage directly in midcourse maneuvers, opening their journeys to human rather than computer control. For robotic cargo shipments, distances matter less than the depths of gravitational wells because high speeds are less important. An object that has escaped from the well of a planet or a moon will coast comparatively freely through
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last? The oxygen locked into the ice has tremendous value for liquid rocket fuel, which otherwise must be sent from the Earth’s much deeper gravitational well, and for human respiration. Furthermore, how can we exploit this icy resource without destroying its greatest significance for science, the historical record locked within it
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public attitudes about astronauts on Mars and astronauts on asteroids. Although asteroids teem with mineral wealth and offer comparatively easy access because of their modest gravitational wells, you will wait a long time before anyone brings asteroids into a conversation about solar-system exploration, and even longer before you hear anyone insist
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space—Nereus possesses an additional advantage over the moon, and indeed over any sizable moon of another planet. These much larger objects have correspondingly deep gravitational wells that require large amounts of energy to remove any material from their surfaces. Nereus has a tiny well: its gravitational force upon objects on its
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they are needed. Although such activities might seem dangerous only to those engaged in them, the same fact that promotes mining on asteroids—their modest gravitational wells—also allows the easy escape of dust and debris, or, even worse, the deliberate discard of the tailings from mining operations into space. The side
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miles. Nevertheless, to send either astronauts or cargo into near-Earth orbit remains an expensive undertaking, simply because even partial escape from the Earth’s gravitational well requires reaching speeds of many miles per second, which in turn require an impressive expenditure of energy, along with a system to direct it properly
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Glenn, John, 4 Goddard, Robert, 2, 3 Goddard Space Flight Center, 2 gold, 98, 99, 101–103 gravitational force, 29, 41, 60, 78, 94, 99 gravitational well, 26–29, 56, 94, 99, 102, 121 greenhouse effect, 92 Grunsfeld, John, 91, 92 habitats, 6, 23–25, 32, 35, 39; on Mars, 39, 75
Collider
by Paul Halpern · 3 Aug 2009 · 279pp · 75,527 words
its mutual gravitational attraction, and become more massive over time. Nothing is mysterious or unusual about this process except that black holes form particularly steep gravitational wells. Astronomers observe this accumulation of material through images of the radiation emitted as it falls inward toward the black hole. The physics of black holes
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two different parts of space-time. Like black holes, wormholes are formed when matter distorts the fabric of the universe enough to create a deep gravitational well. However, because of a hypothetical extra ingredient called phantom matter (or exotic matter) with negative mass and negative energy, wormholes respond differently to intruders. While
Revelation Space
by Alastair Reynolds · 1 Jan 2000 · 804pp · 212,335 words
' work. Instead, she had minutes in which to act. She was sucked into — not so much a pit of despondency, as a bottomless, endlessly plummeting gravitational well. But, when she had dropped deep into its maw — and several of those precious minutes had elapsed — she remembered something; something so obvious she should
Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Apollo Moon Landings
by Jay Barbree, Howard Benedict, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton and Neil Armstrong · 1 Jan 1994 · 469pp · 124,784 words
impossible. They had left earth atop America’s largest rocket. The mightiest energy machine ever built to lift straight up and away from the deep gravitational well of the planet. A monster of steel and ice and fire atop which no man had ever before flown—and they were risking everything to
The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze
by Laura Shin · 22 Feb 2022 · 506pp · 151,753 words
buy the fucking dip. Pizza, polyamory and psychedelic shorts; that spooksexy, freakynaughty, that good meshy love. CC: everyone and invoice Wendycoin. Views from atop a gravitational well, white, yellow, mauve, polkadotted skies and Bogartian sunsets. (Some of the references were to how there wasn’t assigned seating but shared tables, a collaboration
Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code
by Jeff Atwood · 3 Jul 2012 · 270pp · 64,235 words
hell to hire from your community whenever possible. These are the folks who were naturally drawn to what you do, that were pulled into the gravitational well of your company completely of their own accord. The odds of these candidates being a good cultural fit are abnormally high. That’s what you
Ancestral Night
by Elizabeth Bear · 5 Mar 2019 · 596pp · 163,351 words
from the couch. We were alone out here. Nobody was going to come along and snatch our prize todia. “Whoa,” Connla said. “What in nine gravity wells and an event horizon is that thing?” Well, that was what I got for feeling cheerful. It’s hard to get a sense of scale
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here in the big dark we were less likely to plow into a star. Even in white space, that would be a catastrophe; their enormous gravity wells didn’t warp space-time enough to reach into warp space, per se—but running a space-time fold through a star didn’t have
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the blurs of light outside, which were now contorting and lensing in rippled tortoiseshell patterns as Singer coasted us around the rim of some giant gravity well. We were accelerating again, too, though I couldn’t feel it through the ship. The parasite was keeping me informed, though, as I was learning
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space-time. Pulled from before by its compression. Exactly what the white drive did, only without the bubble. Sliding down a sudden and unexpected regional gravity well. “This is going to fuck up orbital dynamics alllll over this system,” I said out loud as Singer leaped down the slope in space-time
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built-in echolocation. It’s pretty common to visualize space-time via a wireframe projection, which is useful because it makes the concept of a “gravity well” and so forth intuitively obvious. If you’re a planetary, it’s like visualizing the landscape’s inclines via a topographic map. Of course, it
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if I were feeling a great, transparent, but still defined real matrix that I was embedded in but could move through, more or less freely. Gravity wells like cliffs you could fall down from any angle, or like great down-welling currents—easy to sense, and instinctively I knew they were dangerous
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you use for landmarks, if this was how you sensed the world? Where would you post signage, so to speak?” “Black holes,” Connla said promptly. “Gravity wells. Gravity peaks. Is that even a thing? Big blank spots, right? Gaps between things.” “I’m wondering if this map is relativistic or quantum,” Singer
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fired back out again to allow even a small amount to fall in. “What if you put a white bubble inside a black hole’s gravity well,” I said, “but, you know, outside the Schwarzschild radius. Could you park something there? Something you didn’t want people to find until they had
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my heart rate, and blood pressure, and adrenaline levels, and all sorts of things. And if I could control the Prize’s pinpoint application of gravity, well. Gravity was a beautiful way to deal with Farweather, wasn’t it? Gravity would make a most satisfactory trap. ♦ ♦ ♦ Oh bugger. One more thing to
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all around. Jets kicked in from her suit pack as she started a burn. More momentum to push her out of Singer’s tiny, artificial gravity well. I jerked my head back to watch her leave, arms splayed wide, so violently I almost overbalanced and fell over backward with my boots still
Machine: A White Space Novel
by Elizabeth Bear · 5 Oct 2020 · 537pp · 146,610 words
any actual velocity to the ship, it couldn’t be used to chase down quarry in normal space. We’d had to slingshot the big gravity well at our origin point in the Core to accelerate, then conserve momentum through the transition in order to catch the speeding generation ship. I say
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moving somewhat faster than she should be, even if she’d been under constant acceleration since leaving Earth. And giving a reasonable wiggle factor for gravity wells along the way boosting and slowing her. Plus she’s on the wrong vector.” “Thanks, Sally. So… she’s gone a lot farther using that
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it when you tear through their pleasant residential neighborhood at a rate of several astronomical units per hour. We’d have to dump v around gravity wells again, the same way we’d gained it outbound. Also, we could make up for a lot of it by coming up on the Core
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billet on a Judiciary ship was the best way to get that experience. And to get better medical care. And because getting out of a gravity well for a while seemed like a dream come true, if I were honest. I’d promised I’d come back at the end of the
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again. [We couldn’t stand the idea, after centians in space, of being trapped in the earth forever, unmoving. Unable to see out of a gravity well. We couldn’t bear it. No amount of adjusting our chemistry helped to reconcile us. We were fortunate to find this place. [Besides, if we
How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie · 19 Sep 2016
dark. It made him think about how to solve problems in a different way, whether it was something grand like getting out of Earth’s gravity well into space, or running when he should probably be walking. Once reduced to a life of sitting, of barely walking, he now wanted to soar
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Singularity Sky
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Scratch Monkey
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To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
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Wireless
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Seveneves
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Ringworld
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Abaddon's Gate
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Startide rising
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Excession
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Judas Unchained
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The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection
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Children of Ruin
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Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program
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Diaspora
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Hyperion
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What Technology Wants
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The Ringworld engineers
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Old Man's War
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The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!
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Blue Mars
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Red Mars
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Icehenge
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Green Mars
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A Man on the Moon
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Iron Sunrise
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Matter
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Gnomon
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Consider Phlebas
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Velocity Weapon
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A Half-Built Garden
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Gateway
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The Speed of Dark
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Engineering Infinity
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Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition
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The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places
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Anvil of Stars
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Look To Windward
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Broken Angels
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The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History
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The Player of Games
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Glasshouse
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The Rapture of the Nerds
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Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
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Across Realtime
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The Snow Queen
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Pathfinder
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Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet
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The God Delusion
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Hull Zero Three
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How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
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Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
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Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
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Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact
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Use of Weapons
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Foundation's Edge
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Frommer's Hawaii 2009
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Zoe's Tale
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Toast
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