October 20, 2010

Physicist’s Goodnight Moon

What happens when a physicist considers the passage of time in Goodnight Moon? Chad Orzel, physics professor and blogger, attempts to measure it using the illustrated passing of the moon versus the wall clocks:

These two methods clearly do not agree with one another, which means one of two things: either I’m terribly over-analyzing the content of the illustrations of a beloved children’s book, or the bunny’s bedroom is moving at extremely high velocity relative to the earth, so that relativistic time dilation makes the six-minute rise of the moon appear to take an hour and ten minutes. Calculating the necessary velocity is left as an exercise for the interested reader.

(Photo credit: Chad Orzel)