Something to get you thinking..........

[MotorWorld]

Two identical Aircraft take off at exactly the same time from an airfield conveniantly situated in an African country exactly on the equator. The time/date is 12.30pm on 31st December 2012. Aircraft A flies exactly due West, Aircraft B flies exactly due East. Both aircraft have sufficient fuel on board to fly around the world without landing or refueling. Both aircraft fly at a constant 650mph (speed through the air). Wind is not an issue for either aircraft as they both fly high enough to be unaffected by it. Both aircraft fly at a constant 50,000ft when cruising. Both aircraft ascend/descend from/to cruising speed/altitude at the same rate. The ascent/descent takes 15 minutes each way, and the aircraft travel 50 miles to gain/lose altitude at the start/end of their journies.. Both aircraft will avoid any potential collision without substantially altering their course.

The given the circumferance of the Earth at sea level on the equator is 24,901.5 miles. Both planes complete a full flight around the world, in different directions.

Which plane lands back at the airfield in Africa first?

What is the approximate date/time of the landing?

What is the approximate date/time of the second plane landing?

What is the time difference between the planes landing?

Which plane uses least fuel?



don't forget this guy...

http://www.maniacworld.com/albert-einstein-1.jpg

[nthfinity]

http://www.uncleodiescollectibles.com/img_lib/Jetpack%201%2010%206-15-4.jpg

This guy would win, use the least fuel, about 1 gallon, and will arrive on june 3rd of 1983 traveling only 89 miles.

My arithmetic is flawless!

[nthfinity]

My calculations are WRONG!!! I forgot to take into account the man Dan told me not to forget about! Damn general relativity!

Relativity passes new test of time

http://images.iop.org/objects/physicsweb/news/thumb/11/11/13/Tuning.jpg
Tuning lasers (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/31792/1/Tuning)
Einstein’s famous tenet of special relativity — that time slows down on a moving clock — has been verified 10 times more precisely than ever before. The result comes from physicists in Germany and Canada, who have timed the “ticking” of lithium ions as they hurtle around a ring at a fraction of the speed of light.
Sit two clocks side by side and, if they are accurate, they will always show the same time. But if one clock is moving rapidly, it will appear to an observer standing next to the stationary clock to be ticking too slowly. This “time dilation” effect, which was predicted by Einstein in his special theory of relativity in 1905, has been verified many times — first to within 1% of predictions in an experiment by Herbert Ives and G R Stilwell in 1938, and more recently by comparing the times of atomic clocks on Earth with those of orbiting global-positioning-system (GPS) satellites.
Such measurements haven’t stopped scientists from suggesting deviations from special relativity (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/19076), however. For instance, those that are looking for explanations why there is much more matter than antimatter in the universe often invoke a violation of “CPT theorem”, which says that the laws of physics remain the same if the charge, parity and time-reversal properties of a particle are inverted together. CPT violation can justify the observed excess of normal matter, but it might also imply the equations underlying the Standard Model of particle physics, which are based on special relativity, are incomplete.
Testing times
Experiments by Gerald Gwinner (http://www.physics.umanitoba.ca/%7Egwinner/pmwiki/pmwiki.php) from the University of Manitoba in Canada, together with colleagues from various German institutions, give no hint of such deviations from special relativity and thus physics beyond the Standard Model. To test Einstein’s theory, they improved on a technique called laser saturation spectroscopy to measure the time dilation of groups of lithium-7 ions injected at high speed into a magnetic storage ring, based at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg (Nature Physics advance online publication (http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nphys778.html)).
It means that at the sensitivity level of our experiment, and all others that look for evidence of new physics beyond the Standard Model, is not high enough yet to see anything When at rest with respect to an observer, lithium-7 ions have an electronic transition between energy levels that always takes place at a frequency close to 546 THz — effectively a “ticking clock”. In principle, the amount time dilation changes this frequency for speeding lithium-7 ions could be found by illuminating them with a laser from behind and noting the laser frequency that incites the transition — shown by the ions “fluorescing” or absorbing and re-emitting photons in all directions. In practice, a group of ions in a storage ring have a distribution of velocities, which limits the measurement precision.
Two observers
The researchers avoid this limitation by aiming a second laser into the beam of ions. Although this laser also makes all the ions fluoresce, those in the centre of the velocity distribution receive so many photons that their fluorescence saturates causing a local dip in the spectrum so that ions of only one velocity are “marked”.
http://images.iop.org/objects/physicsweb/news/thumb/11/11/13/Facility.jpg
Storage ring (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/31792/1/Facility)
Gwinner and colleagues then take the product of the two lasers’ frequencies, which — according to special relativity — should be equal to the square of the transition frequency when the lithium-7 ions are stationary. But because this transition frequency isn’t known accurately enough for their needs, the researchers repeat the experiment for lithium-7 ions travelling at both 3% and 6.4% of the speed of light and check the products are the same.
As expected, the products were indeed the same. But the accuracy of Gwinner and colleagues’ experiment, which is quantified by a “Mansouri-Sexl parameter” of less than 8.4 × 10-8, is over 10 times better than the GPS tests of special relativity. “It means that at the sensitivity level of our experiment, and all others that look for evidence of new physics beyond the Standard Model, is not high enough yet to see anything,” Gwinner told physicsworld.com.


Anybody up for calculating the real answer!?!?!?!?

[gucom]

it takes about 38.74769 hours to fly around the world
The plane flying east arrives first since it has the end point (which is also the starting point) moving towards it while the plane flying west has the finish moving away from it. However, with these figures i don't know how to calculate the difference and i doubt it'd be noticable...

[Pokiou]

Plane heading east would land first.
Possibly same day he took off...

[blinkmeat]

Point One: Whatever you think about anything is wrong.

Point Two: There is no such thing as Point One. You THINK there is a Point One, but that just shows what a physics moron you are.

Point Three: If there are two identical twins, and one of them gets on a spacecraft going at nearly the speed of light, then one of them will grow old much faster than the other one, and that one will retire to Miami.

Point Three: There is an infinite number of possible Point Threes, and they all are all equally true, and you will never understand ANY of them.

OK? Is that clear to everybody? Good! To prove you really understand, I want you all to write me a 15-page paper on how the universe works and send it backward through time to me in 1964, c/o Mr. Blinkmeat's class. OK, I got it. Thanks.

[gucom]

so karma, what's the solution?

[Garretts_turbo]

yes....42.

[ferrarif1fan89]

Jesus...... I need a cigarette.

[acmarttin]

Oh is this one of those things where you're supposed to read the last line first?

No?

Well, fuck it then.

[HeilSvenska]

None.

[79TA]

First off, the world spins east . . . this explains the rising and setting of the sun. If this were done with orbiters or something, the one travelling west would have an advantage as its destination is moving towards it. I assume the air is moving along with the world (as it does) . . . otherwise if the 650 mph where only relative to the center of the earth, the plane could not keep up with the earth's rotation. I will then treat the 650 mph much like groundspeed except that the planes are higher up and cover more distance as a result (slower speed in radians than if at ground level). However, assuming the air is moving along with the earth means neither has an advantage. It all comes down to which one is not being flown by James May.