h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

For explanation:

Earth is spinning around the sun.
The whole solar system is rotating with the Milky Way.
The Milky Way is rotating with the galaxy.
The galaxy is rotating with god-knows-what.

The questions are:
If I stop rotating with all this systems for 5 Minutes,
where would I be?
If someone on earth could watch me, in which direction
would i move how fast?
And: Is this a question of physics, philosophy or theology?

...waiting for reply...

hmm, that's a pretty good question.... but that depends on what you are: a hamster or a man?

greetings.....

Directionally, I suppose it depends where you (and the observer) happen to be when you decide to stop moving along with the rest of the world.

Just taking movement around the *sun* into account, the distance relative to your start point would be something like 5500 miles.

(It does sound a lot, but the sun is 93 million miles away, and 93M miles*2*pi/365 => 1.6M miles/day => 5555 miles in 5 minutes)

As far as asking how fast you'd be moving, it's a physics question.
As far as any practical *usefulness* of the question is concerned, it's definitely philosophy.
Given that you'd be moving at 66000mph through the atmosphere, you'd be pretty much instantly vaporised anyway , so a bit of theology (before takeoff) might come in handy as well.

I think, you forgot some details:
You can't take only the sun as a reference point, because
the sun is a moving point in a bigger system too.
You can't take this point too, because maybe it's a moving
point in a much more bigger system, and so on...

The Point is:
You can't give any properly answer to this question if you
don't know anything about the universe and it's surrounding
e.g. if you are GOD himself.

But I can fail - surprise me, give me the answer!

Ah but it's all relative anyway isn't it.

If you and I were travelling along side by side at exactly 100mph and looked at each other we wouldn't be seem to be moving at all.
If I stopped and you carried on, you be travelling at 100mph.
What it all comes down to is that it's all relative to the observer, so when you stop and everything else doesn't, the earth will have moved whatever the distance was, spun 3degrees further on it's axis.
And while all this was going on, the sun and all the solar system and galaxy will have moved, but as it all moves together you won't notice.

Still a few thousand miles in five minutes, not bad for not going anywhere.

Hang on, I'm more an *engineer* than a scientist.
I didn't *forget* anything at all, I just chose to ignore it.

a few points of argument...

1) you can use the sun as a point of refrence despite the fact that it is moving in another system (heck we use the earth as a refrence to judge the speed of any moving vehicle on this planet)

2) you can take that other point as well you can use any point but that is the point you will be moving relative to

3) now this argument is a bit shaky because i am not totaly sure myself but i will try it anyway. i believe there is an answer and it can be measured (though it will be zero). See i believe the ultimate refrence point is the point of the big bang since that is the point all matter is moving away from, so therefor should be the real point of refrence, and that is the point that you would probably want to stop moving relative to. in that case you would either be crushed by the earth because you were on the wrong side, or you would be seen as moving away at the rate of the universes expansion (plus/minus the motion of the earth relative to a point moving purelya at the rate of expansion) at out point in the inviverse (which is known by scientists but not by me).

Hope that doesn't sound too confusing (i knwo i am confused)
and i hope i am not too wrong either

You brought a really good argument, I had to think about it -
so here's the border of it: Which would be the referenc point if you are an electron spinning around an Atom?
You (as atom) would think it's the center of your atom, because the other atoms are to far away to see them(related to your size as electron.
What would be our reference point, if there were an infinite number of universes around you, like pulsing (expanding&contracting) litte parts (like atoms) of bigger Systems? Would there be any use for our centre of our universe as objective point?

... looking forward to incoming answers ...

You also bring up a good point... and i will try to respond to the best of my abilities (i am only a highschool student, and in the US school system no less). If there were other universes out there that we can not see (i will make a leap here and assume you mean there is no way for us to detect them either or learn anything about them) then their existence is of absolutely no relevance to us. My resoning of this is that if we can't see them, or detect them in any way at all then they must have no physical force of any kind on us (if a bomb goes of next to you but you do not detect it it has obviously had no effect on you).
This can be aplied to the electron/atom metaphor too. The distance of the electron from the atoms nucleus is related to the amount of energy contained in the electron, but the farther the electron moves the smaller the incriment becomes till the energy it can take is halved (i was taught that electrons have negative energy while orbiting the nucleus and the energy aproaches zero as the electron gets farther) at a certain point it reaches a point where the energy is essentially zero once past that point the atom can no longer be detected by the electron and so it has no influence on it and in a way the electron is not moving (even though we know it is) What i am trying to show is that from the perspective of the electron there is no way to tell its motion or distance from other atoms.
The same aplies to us and out universe. We can in no way detect another universe while we are still in ours (lets assume that unlike atoms universes don't form bonds). So assuming that what i said makes any sence and is in some way coherent you can then make the conclusion that there is then no way to tell your motion relative to anything outside of our universe (definition of universe from M-W: a set that contains all elements relevant to a particular discussion or problem)
So the answer to your question would now be there is no refrence point, while the center of our universe would remain a valuable refrence point)

that was an awfuly long post, my fingers are getting tiered (and my brain has now run away)

It depends on how you visualise the universe - some of the common analogies can be misleading. What I'm saying below is only right if the universe has a particular geometry. I think *some* astrophysicists reckon this is the way it is, but I really wouldn't know the proportions.
I'll *try* to explain, but it's not necessarily very easy.

One common illustration of an expanding universe is a load of galaxies painted on a balooon which is then inflated - everything moves away from everything else. Essentially, it's a 2-dimensional example - it's *only* the surface of the baloon we're thinking of, and this imaginary warped 2D universe, to get from one galaxy to the one most distant from it, we'd have to travel solely through the baloon surface. There isn't a centre of the universe in this model.

When trying to expand the model to 3D, it's very tempting to imagine that going from thinking of the baloon to thinking of an expanding sphere would do the trick. (eg raisins getting farther apart in an slowly expanding christmas pudding) Unfortunately, that idea leads people to think the universe has a centre, and a boudary.

Instead, try imagining the universe as a solid cube, where all the opposite faces are connected so that if you move out of the top of the cube, you instantly re-enter through the bottom, etc. The difference between this wraparound cube and the sphere is that (as far as anyone *inside* could tell), it doesn't have any edges, and therefore doesn't have a centre.

(In fact, I think a better example might be a sphere, where if you move out through any point on the surface, you instantly re-enter at the opposite point on the other side of the sphere, but that's a bit tricky to think about.)

Bah what poppycock. The answer is simple. If you stopped moving for 5 mins, you'd end up exactly where you started, sadly your concious mind would remain as it was. The arrogance of man assumes that the sum of his knowledge is the totality of wisdom, until he learns something new then he simply alters his perception to accept this new data.
The question you ask is still based in this half truth knowledge. Do you still believe that you're simply a mass, tied down to other masses spinning round other masses. We used to think that we were the centre of the universe and everything span around us, then we decided that the exact opposite. Ho long till we decide we were right the first time?

You said that systems in great distances fail influencing each other.
For an (e.g. gas-)atom is an other atom really far away. Good. But in your foot you have single atoms forming a system. And if this system moves, each part of it moves with it. The movement of this foot would never be noticable to it. I don't say, that we are influenced by any forces from other universes, I say, that we are moving with them.
So you have with each change of scale a new point of reference.

West. Definitely west. I think.
ok, one system at a time...
rotation: you fly west very quickly
revolution: You either gain or lose altitude, very quickly. So far...you are either rocketing up through the atmosphere, or digging a tunnel through the earth....doesn't sound too comfortable. Are you sure you want to go through with this?
Precession: Adds a very slight angle to your trajectory.
solar revolution: ok, now it gets tricky....but boils down to moving even faster away from the earth or towards the earth.
Revolution around the Virgo cluster of galaxys.....hmmmm. I don't have any idea which way that would be....I'll leave this one for someone else.
Great Attractor: hmmm?
expansion of universe.....hmmm....now this one might actually work in your favor. Each bit of matter is getting farther away than each other bit of matter.....so if you weren't moving, wouldn't this keep you closer to the Earth?

Summary: In 5 minutes, you would be a blob of water vapor and trace gasses....gasses because you either punched a hole straight through the earth, or frictioned yourself to death in the atmosphere....and since you started moving again after five minutes, presumably you would fall back into some sort of orbit around the sun or one of the planets....the total accumulated speed can't be greater than the speed of light, but I imagine would be a fair percentage of it. The sun is eight minutes away at the speed of light, so you would be somewhere between, say Mercury's orbit and Jupiter's orbit, and would gradually fall into orbit around some body or other....but as a loose blob of dirty water vapor. Hey! You might become a comet! Some cult might fixate on you, then it would become a theological issue for them. (sorry for rambling on)

And I used to think that teaching 15-yrs old high-school students astronomy was _relatively_ difficult... I _really_ have to reconsider it now . Now I'll just go back preparing the test they're going to take this friday and HOPE that not one of them has read this thread... I don't think they've even understood the difference between a comet, an asteroid and a meteoroid and I don't want to start explaining how non-moving people can become comets...

Hilarious, LOL