Goin' Fast

A dirt-simple explainer about speed, in a country voice, with the arithmetic left in. Twenty measured speeds from the ground under the house to light itself, what each one costs, and where the ceiling is.

Live: https://nanobotco.github.io/goin-fast/

The whole thing, dirt simple

1. Fast is always fast compared to somethin'. Pick the somethin' first.
2. Holdin' a speed is free. Changin' it costs.
3. Air fights back harder the faster you go — a lot harder.
4. Orbit ain't up. Orbit is sideways, fast enough to keep missin' the ground.
5. There is a top speed. Light. 299,792,458 metres a second.
6. Get near it and your speed quits climbin' — your watch slows down instead.

What is on it

• The ladder — twenty speeds, smallest to biggest, each with its arithmetic and the measurement it came off: a racing snail at 0.00275 m/s, Bolt at 12.27, a cheetah at 25.9, a peregrine at 108, a bullwhip tip at twice the speed of sound, ThrustSSC, the SR-71, the X-15, the space station, escape velocity, the Parker Solar Probe, light.
• Sound — what the sound barrier is, why the Mach cone has the angle it has, why the boom is a strip on the ground rather than an event, and why a whip beat Yeager by a few thousand years.
• Air — drag goes with the square of speed, power with the cube: 19 hp at 60 mph, 45 at 80, to shove the same truck-shaped hole through the same still air.
• Orbit — Newton's cannonball, integrated from a = −GM/r². Orbital speed at station height, escape from the surface, and why the fastest thing ever built got that way by falling.
• The limit — speeds that will not stack, the gamma factor, the GPS clock correction and the 10 km a day it is worth, and what does travel at c.
• Cheats — five things that outrun light and break no rule: shadows, scissors, phase velocity, the expansion of space, entangled pairs.
• Reckoner — four calculators, running in the page.

Where the numbers come from

tools/figures.py computes the orbital and escape speeds, the Mach angle, the drag figures, the gamma factors and the five cannonball trajectories from the formulas printed beside them, then writes build/facts.json. tools/site.py reads that file, so a sentence and the diagram next to it are the same computation. tests/test_site.py checks the results against published values — NASA's fact sheets, the FAI and FIA records, CODATA's G — and fails the build on a drift.

Sources are listed at /sources/, 34 of them, numbered, with a link each.

Build

python3 tools/figures.py     # the six diagrams (SVG) and build/facts.json
python3 tools/site.py        # the pages, into build/site/
python3 tests/test_site.py   # the arithmetic, against published values
./publish.sh                 # all of it, checked, into docs/
python3 tools/serve.py 8841  # a local preview, mounted at /goin-fast/

Python 3.9 or later, standard library only. The pages are static HTML with the stylesheet inlined and the diagrams inlined as SVG, so a page is one request.

The hollerin' in the diagrams is CSS, and it stops under prefers-reduced-motion: reduce.

Licence

• Text, diagrams and data: CC BY 4.0. Credit line: Nan · hongdam.net · CC BY 4.0, with a link to https://nanobotco.github.io/goin-fast/ .
• Code in tools/, js/, tests/: MIT.

Made by Hongdam, Chiang Rai.

Elsewhere from the same publisher

• Mot Dang — city directory for Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai
• The Mae Hong Son Loop — motorcycling the 600 km loop out of Chiang Mai — curves counted, air measured
• Muay Thai — the eight limbs, the thirty named techniques, the ceremony, and every gym on the map
• Roads of Chiang Mai — the square of 1296, four rings, and what each one did to the city — counted from the map
• wichaa — Lanna manuscripts, the amulet market, and the traditions around them
• Hand Poke — 28 traditions of marking skin by hand — the leg-tattoo zone of Burma, the Shan States and Lanna, counted
• Black Holes, Drawn — black holes modelled and drawn from the equations — generators, the past, present and future, the legends
• Quantum Computing, plainly — the history and theory of quantum computing in plain words, with demos; refreshed weekly
• The Three-Body Problem — the mathematics of the three-body problem in plain words, with the orbits found rather than copied
• Exceptional Magic — the octonions, triality, the magic square and E8, computed and drawn — a plain-spoken reading of one paper
• Amulet Atlas — amulets, charms and talismans worldwide
• Carolina Barbecue — barbecue in North and South Carolina
• Wing Country — the American chicken wing
• Pink Box — the American mom-and-pop donut shop
• Basque Tables — Basque dining rooms of California, Nevada and Idaho
• Pinot Country — pinot noir: the vine, the regions, the cellars
• Care Abroad — treatment across borders, with published prices and their dates
• Thai Roots — a root dictionary of Thai, with a word decomposer
• The index — every corpus, site and repository, counted
• Uptake — a field manual on publishing for machines that copy
• NaNoBotCo — the portal
• ฮักฝรั่ง — เรื่องเงิน วีซ่า และชีวิตกับแฟนฝรั่ง
• Offrampt — turning crypto into spendable local money, Thailand first

All of it, counted: https://nanobotco.github.io/index/ · roster as JSON: https://nanobotco.github.io/index/fleet.json