simonshack wrote:
Lo and behold ! This is the almost exact same figure now commonly accepted (by NASA and all) as the escape velocity needed for an object to exit from our Earth's atmosphere! Yet, Jules Verne somehow calculated this figure back in 1865? Amazing !
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Well, a far more likely, non-nonsense proposition would be that NASA simply 'stole' those figures from science-fiction writers such as Jules Verne - and adopted them as their own "scientific figures". As a matter of fact, we are told that Tsiolkovsky (the soviet rocket-scientist hailed as the "Father of Space travel") was the man who scientifically calculated this "11km/s" escape velocity speed needed for any object to escape our atmosphere. But hey, Tsiolkovsky (the rocket scientist) came up with this "11" figure almost half a century after Jules Verne (the sci-fi novelist) !
This is interesting, I didn't know Jules Verne gave that number in the 1865 book. But, at that time they should have been able to calculate it, as the mass of the earth and the big G should have been known, and the calculation involved simple newton equation. The wiki (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass) mentions the mass was known as early as 1737, and of course, the famous Cavendish experiment of 1798 (which no one ever repeated, not even today, although universities usually have the experiment in their labs, but "the technician is sick today", "the equipment just got broken", "so sorry guys, we can't perform it today",...)
Probably J Verne was imagining of a cannon ball style projectile reaching the Moon, and somebody calculated the (escape) speed for him, and later, when it was realized that rockets don't work in vacuum, they also accepted the story of the escape velocity.
After all, they love to set up numbers, like the 11, or 9, or 9/11, or 7, or 7/11, etc.
Or for example, the tilt of the Earth is:
666 /10 degrees (=90-23.4), or the speed of the Earth around the Sun is:
666 *100miles/h (18.5miles/s), or the curvature of the Earth per squared mile is
666 mFt (8 inches)
they definitely love the numbers games, which we don't see
