Word: cooperized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Verne's underground hike would, have taken far less time, says Cooper, if he had simply fallen into a frictionless tunnel bored through the earth's center. Accelerated by the force of gravity on the first half of his trip, he would have gained just enough kinetic energy to coast up to the other side-against the pull of gravity-in a total time of only 42.2 minutes...
Universal Timetable. Fascinated by his initial calculation, Cooper worked out a formula for the time required for an object to fall through a straight-line tunnel bored between any two points on the surface of the earth. Surprisingly, no matter how close or far apart the two points were, the time turned out to be constant: 42.2 minutes...
According to Cooper's equations, by "dropping" in airless, frictionless, straight-line tunnels, passenger vehicles powered only by the pull of gravity could theoretically travel between Washington and Moscow, which are 4,850 surface miles apart, in the same time it would take them to travel from Washington to Boston, only 400 miles away. "One can envisage a transportation system without timetables," says Cooper, tongue in cheek, "with the world's cities linked by tunnels, the departure time universally on the hour, and the arrival time 42.2 minutes later...
Undaunted by such practicalities, Cooper has also set up and solved by computer a set of differential equations for curved tunnels that would provide minimum gravity-powered travel time between any two cities on earth. These tunnels would swoop into the ground at steeper angles and penetrate to even greater depths. Though travel times would vary, all would be less than the 42.2 minutes required for straight-line trips...
...Cooper has let his imagination soar even farther. Using different radii and gravitational forces in his formulas, he has laid out the mathematical groundwork for extraterrestrial travel networks. According to his calculations, straight-line tunnel travel between any two surface locations would be 53 minutes on the moon, 49 on Mars...