¶ Balloon
Index Entry
Balloon:
“the others, and precessing them but not hitting the bag. I saw that we can have two swimmers and they can jump off the same end of the swimming tank together, go to the other end, and use the inertia of the tank to shove off, to go in the other direction and build up their velocity. If you could start the two swimmers at opposite ends of the tank and they could get to the middle of the tank and push off from each other’s feet, then they would go off and hit the other end of the tank. If the tank was pretty small and they did that, they could shove off from each other’s feet and hit the end of the tank pretty hard. So we could have conditions where these molecules shoving off from one another, and very close to the bag, would make simply a chord and ricochet off. . . You could study the ways these are hitting and the patterns they are making, and when they hit they ricochet off and make another angle, so they are the ones that are accounting for all the work. . . So this pattern of the swimmers, of the two meeting each other and they bounce off like that, hit the bag, and then run into another pair. You begin to find that they are pairable. So we discover that all we are accounting for can be paired. The chord of an arc is always less distance than the length of the arc itself.”
¶ Citations
- Oregon Lecture #5, p. 188,9July '62
