GOIN' FAST

Sources35 of them. A number in the text points here.

Where a rung on the ladder is arithmetic off a published measurement — miles an hour turned into metres a second, a course record turned into a speed — the arithmetic is printed under the rung and the measurement is what is linked here.

  1. USGS, Understanding plate motions. https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/understanding.html
  2. World Snail Racing Championships, Congham, Norfolk — Archie's 1995 course record. https://www.snailracing.net/
  3. FHWA, Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices §4E.06 — pedestrian clearance at 3.5 ft/s. https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/
  4. Graubüner & Nixdorf, Biomechanical analysis of the sprint events, 12th IAAF World Championships, Berlin 2009. https://worldathletics.org/development/research-centre
  5. Wilson et al., Locomotion dynamics of hunting in wild cheetahs, Nature 498 (2013) 185–189. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12295
  6. US interstate posted limits, 65–80 mph by state. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/
  7. Ken Franklin's 1999 skydive measurements of a trained peregrine's stoop, reported in National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/facts/peregrine-falcon
  8. NASA Glenn Research Center, Speed of sound. https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/sound.html
  9. FIA world land speed record, ThrustSSC, 15 October 1997. https://www.fia.com/
  10. Goriely & McMillen, Shape of a cracking whip, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 244301 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.88.244301
  11. SAAMI published velocities for .30-06 Springfield, 150 gr. https://saami.org/
  12. Fédération Aéronautique Internationale record 8886, Lockheed SR-71A, 28 July 1976. https://www.fai.org/records
  13. NASA Armstrong fact sheet, X-15 hypersonic research program. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-052-DFRC.html
  14. NASA, International Space Station facts and figures. https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station/
  15. NASA NSSDCA, Earth fact sheet. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html
  16. NASA JPL, Voyager mission status. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
  17. NASA, Parker Solar Probe closest approach, 24 December 2024. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/parker-solar-probe/
  18. Reid et al., Trigonometric parallaxes of high-mass star forming regions, ApJ 885 (2019) 131. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab4a11
  19. BIPM, SI brochure — the metre, 17th CGPM (1983). https://www.bipm.org/en/measurement-units/si-defining-constants
  20. Neil Ashby, Relativity in the Global Positioning System, Living Reviews in Relativity 6:1 (2003). https://doi.org/10.12942/lrr-2003-1
  21. Abbott et al., Gravitational waves and gamma-rays from a binary neutron star merger: GW170817 and GRB 170817A, ApJL 848 L13 (2017). https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/aa920c
  22. Isaac Newton, A Treatise of the System of the World (1728) — the cannon on the mountain. https://archive.org/details/treatiseofsystem00newt
  23. Energy Institute, Statistical Review of World Energy 2024 — world primary energy about 620 exajoules. https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review
  24. Albert Einstein, Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper, Annalen der Physik 17 (1905) 891–921. https://doi.org/10.1002/andp.19053221004
  25. Hafele & Keating, Around-the-world atomic clocks, Science 177 (1972) 166–170. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.177.4044.166
  26. Chou, Hume, Rosenband & Wineland, Optical clocks and relativity, Science 329 (2010) 1630–1633 — time dilation measured at 10 m/s and 33 cm of height. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192720
  27. CODATA 2018 recommended values — the gravitational constant G. https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/
  28. NASA, Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1, 14 October 1947. https://www.nasa.gov/history/x-1/
  29. Planck Collaboration, Planck 2018 results VI: cosmological parameters — the expansion rate. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201833910
  30. Miguel Alcubierre, The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity, Class. Quantum Grav. 11 (1994) L73. https://doi.org/10.1088/0264-9381/11/5/001
  31. Ghirardi, Rimini & Weber, A general argument against superluminal transmission through the quantum mechanical measurement process, Lett. Nuovo Cimento 27 (1980) 293. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02817189
  32. US EPA, Fuel economy at higher speeds. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/driveHabits.jsp
  33. Sighard F. Hoerner, Fluid-Dynamic Drag (1965) — drag coefficients and frontal areas. https://archive.org/details/FluidDynamicDrag
  34. NASA, Sonic booms and the boom carpet. https://www.nasa.gov/aeronautics/sonic-booms/
  35. BIPM, SI brochure — the second and the caesium standard. https://www.bipm.org/en/measurement-units/si-defining-constants

What was computed rather than looked up

Orbital and escape speeds, the Mach cone angle, the drag and power figures, the gamma factors, the energy to accelerate a two-tonne truck, and the five cannonball trajectories were all computed in tools/figures.py from the formulas printed beside them, using G from CODATA[27] and the Earth's mass and radius from the NASA fact sheet[15]. The diagrams are drawn from those same computations, so a figure and the sentence beside it cannot drift apart.

Reuse

Text and diagrams are CC BY 4.0 — take them anywhere, keep the credit line: Nan · hongdam.net · CC BY 4.0, with a link back to https://nanobotco.github.io/goin-fast/. The build code is MIT. The repository is at github.com/NaNoBotCo/goin-fast.

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