First off! Sorry for the delay in posts, miraculously it was not caused by drinking this time around, but because i moved everything i owned and went back to Iceland for the summer (and started a new job at an engineering firm as a summer intern). But just because i’m out of the cozy life of academia for a few months does not mean i’ll put reducedmass on the backburner, there will be updates throughout the summer.

Which brings me to the subject of this post! I actually found this one quite a while ago but somehow completely forgot to write about it, so you may have seen this as well at some social networking sites. It is a video from the History Channel, talking about a gravity express railway. The basic idea is easy to understand, you dig a hole straight through the earth, say from New York to Sidney, and jump in, how long would it take to travel from one end to the other?

The answer? 42 minutes, but what if it’s from New York to Los Angeles? Still 42 minutes! Any two points you’d connect would take 42 minutes. The video actually does a great job at explaining it, and has some cool CGI to illustrate.

However! You shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for this to kick in, seeing as how we humans have been unable to dig any further down than around 12km, and a straight line through the earth would be a bit more than 12.000km.