speed of light Archives

speed of light

2021/05/01 thomas No Comments

well, this is definitely the nerdiest comic i’ve ever done. sorry to everyone who’s just here for the cute drawings.

this is a really counterintuitive concept, because “travelling through time” is the exact opposite of what it is in a time travel movie. if you travel quickly trough time, you actually get to the future slower (from your perspective).

if you want to “time travel” to the future, you need to move slowly through time (by moving really fast through space, like neutrinos) so that everything else ages much faster than you.

yeah i know it’s confusing. blame einstein, not me.

event horizon

2020/12/22 thomas 3 Comments

hopefully non-aussies know what a hills hoist clothesline is, or this comic is gonna be real confusing.

i would be amiss if i failed to mention that ‘spaghettification’ is a real scientific term that you should totally drop whatever you’re doing and google right now. it refers to when the extreme tidal forces of a black hole stretch you into a long skinny noodles should you get too close. well, more likely it would just shred you to pieces, and you would have been well cooked by extreme heat and radiation long before you even got there, but hey, you’d be a tad too dead to appreciate the difference either way.

just stay away from black holes kids. they’re not your friends.

relativity

2020/11/17 thomas No Comments

look at me, actually drawing launch towers properly for once.

plugging some quick numbers into wolfram alpha, the energy required to propel a 100 metric tonne ship to 99% the speed of light is roughly 5.472×10^22 joules. this is equivalent to 1/9th the energy of the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, or 225,000x the energy of the tsar bomba, the largest nuclear bomb in history. and that’s not even to mention the energy required to stop, come back, and stop again.

which is to say, sedna’s being a little optimistic in her dream here.