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Rope around the earth

Image Analyst on 10 Aug 2024 (Edited on 10 Aug 2024)
Latest activity Reply by Adam Danz on 12 Aug 2024

Imagine that the earth is a perfect sphere with a radius of 6371000 meters and there is a rope tightly wrapped around the equator. With one line of MATLAB code determine how much the rope will be lifted above the surface if you cut it and insert a 1 meter segment of rope into it (and then expand the whole rope back into a circle again, of course).

2 Comments

Christian Schröder
Christian Schröder on 10 Aug 2024
Since the length of the rope is 2πr meters, increasing it is equivalent to increasing the radius by 1/(2π) meters - and that's how much it will be lifted off the surface. No MATLAB necessary for this one!
Adam Danz
Adam Danz on 12 Aug 2024
fprintf('%.4f meters',1/(2*pi))
0.1592 meters
A little taller than a soda can. That's pretty difficult for me to imagine. I would have estimated a much smaller height when adding only 1 m length.

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