July
10, 2017 Monday
Bedtime
Story
Gerhard Gentzen, the V-2 Project and the Karman Line
Swearing
complete allegiance to Hitler probably saved Gentzen’s career and he was
allowed to continue in Göttingen wherein from 1935 to 1939 he served as
assistant to David Hilbert.
After
1943 he was recruited by the dreaded Schutzstaffel or the SS for the
construction of the V-2, the world’s first long-range, guided ballistic
missile.
Just
for your information, the V-2 rocket was the first artificial object designed
by human ape that crossed the Karman line.
Ever
heard of Karman line? No?
Well,
the name comes from the Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist and
aerospace engineer Theodore von Kármán.
It
was Karman who first calculated that at an altitude of 100 kilometers above the
Earth’s sea level, the atmosphere becomes too rare to support an aeronautical
space flight.
At
altitudes as high as this, any flying vehicle in order to achieve sufficient
aerodynamic lift, needs to travel faster than orbital velocity.
Earth’s
orbital speed at perihelion is roughly around 30,300 m/s.
In
many places in the literature this line, the Karman line is interchangeably
used as the ‘edge of space’.
As
you will understand that just like one does not become an adult suddenly at the
midnight of the last day of the 17th year, very similarly the
atmosphere does not abruptly end at the Karman line.
It
becomes thinner with altitude very progressively.
Let
me quote to you directly from the autobiography of Kármán (1967 The Wind and
Beyond) on what he has to say on the topic of the edge of the outer space:
“Where
space begins…can actually be determined by the speed of the space vehicle and
its altitude above the earth.
Consider,
for instance, the record flight of Captain Iven Carl Kincheloe Jr. in an X-2
rocket plane.
Kincheloe
flew 2000 miles per hour (3,200 km/hr) at 126,000 feet (38,500 m), or 24 miles
up.
At
this altitude and speed, aerodynamic lift (can be explained by either Newton’s
third law or Bernoulli’s principle) still carries 98 percent of the weight of
the plane, and only two percent is carried by centrifugal force, or Kepler
force, as space scientists call it.
But
at 300,000 feet (91,440 meters) or 57 miles up, this relationship is reversed
because there is no longer any air to contribute lift: only centrifugal force
prevails.
This
is certainly a physical boundary, where aerodynamics stops and astronautics
begins, and so I thought why should it not also be a jurisdictional boundary?
Haley
(Andrew G. Haley, the world’s first advocate to practice space law) has kindly
called it the Kármán Jurisdictional Line.
Below
this line space belongs to each country.
Above
this level there would be free space.”
Stay tuned to the
voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Theodore von Karman (1881 - 1963)
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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