Re: Tau Zero
- From: wdstarr@xxxxxxxxx (William December Starr)
- Date: 4 Sep 2009 16:13:54 -0400
In article <1252038693@xxxxxxxxx>,
throopw@xxxxxxxxx (Wayne Throop) said:
mikea <mikea@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
I *suspect* that the intensity law for a disc-shaped source is
sublinear, but need more math chops than I have.
It's constant for an infinite plane, and close to constant for a
disk, if you are far from the edge. You can intuitively see that,
by assuming your disk is infinitely thin, and consider the line of
sight ot the disk from any given point, treating a "line of sight"
as a very very pointy cone. As you move your point away from the
disk, the gravity due to any given bit of mass inside the cone is
reduced by distance-squared. However, the amount of mass inside
that cone is *in*creased by distance-squared. So your force is
unchanging with distance to the plane.
That of course is fast and loose and about as rigorous as a wet
noodle, but can be made rigorous as an integration across the
whole plane, or across a disk, but that's the gist of it.
ObSF: Stross' "Missile Gap."
-- wds
.
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