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Distance and Time

I have asked this question time and time again and never found a definitive answer to it.

Lets say we want to travel 60 miles and we travel at 60 miles an hour, we get there in an hour. Now by my thinking if we travel at 120 miles an hour, we get there in half an hour.

So if we then travel at 240 miles an hour, do we get there instantaneously? Please someone put me straight on this because it has been nagging my noggin for aeons!

James

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  • Asked by James32
  • on 2010-08-11 17:36:16
  • Member status
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Categories: Domestic Science.

Tags: Timedistancetravel.

 

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petethebloke says:

There's an error in your maths.

EDIT: removed most of my answer after deciding that I was taken in by a spoof.

 

 

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posted on 2010-08-12 15:20:04 | Report abuse

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Paul_Pedant says:

Probably (and sadly), not a spoof, Pete. Some people (not to mention hares, tortoises and Achilles' heels) just suffer from Zeno Phobia.

Personally, I have acute aibohphobia (an irrational fear of palindromes).

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posted on 2010-08-16 10:40:25 | Report abuse


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Paul_Pedant says:

Oh dear. I always wondered about the performance of Active Directory. Now I understand.

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posted on 2010-08-12 15:46:21 | Report abuse


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tomlozethwaite says:

In short, no!

 

To get there in half an hour, you doubled the speed - which halved the time taken at the original speed. Doubling your speed again has the same effect; i.e. you take half as long as you did at the previous speed. So you'd get there in fifteen minutes.

If you doubled the speed yet again, you'd get there in half as much time again (7 minutes 30 seconds) and so on and so forth. If you think about it, in order to get there instantly, you'd have to have travelled in an infinitely short amount of time (since travelling in no time means not travelling at all), which means you must have travelled infinitely fast - which for many reasons is quite impossible.

In future, to calculate the time taken to reach your destination, simply divide the distance you need to travel by the speed at which you intend to travel - provided that you use the same units (km and kph, or miles and mph - no mixing and matching!). 200km at 50kph is 200 divided by 50, which is 4 - so you'll get there in four hours.

One more thing - although doubling your speed halves the journey time, this only applies up to a limit. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, which is around 300,000 km per second. And anything larger than the tiniest subatomic particles can't get anywhere near that speed anyway, due to strange effects that, generally speaking, are best left to physicists =)

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posted on 2010-08-12 17:26:32 | Report abuse

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James32 says:

TY Tom and a big whatever to the other poeple that thought they would take the piss and get all above thier station.

Ty again Tom

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posted on 2011-05-18 10:54:25 | Report abuse


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