Never has my Christmas Gravitation icon been so appropriate

[felis_ultharus]

It's been a pretty emo Christmas, so far -- more than usual. Seeing node357 has been the highlight of it, with my writing (now past 50 pages of what I hope to be the last version) running a close second.

On another note, looking up Tartarus on Wikipedia produced this gem:

"In Hesiod's Theogony, c. 700 BC, the deity Tartarus was the third force to manifest in the yawning void of Chaos.As for the place, the Greek poet Hesiod asserts that a bronze anvil falling from heaven would fall 9 days before it reached the Earth. The anvil would take nine more days to fall from Earth to Tartarus, making it approximately 4733.22 miles deep."

There really ought to be a geek award -- some high honour -- for using time and gravitational constant to calculate the distance of an ancient Greek underworld. I actually tried to do this myself in grade seven, but wasn't good enough at math yet (or now) to pull off the calculus of acceleration -- even after my ex-physicist father tried to explain it to me.

It does make one wonder, though -- when you throw Einstein into the mix, funny things happen to gravity. Erebus -- the layers of darkness surrounding Tartarus -- would trap even light, so does not that mean they could be considered to have some of the properties of a black hole?

And what of mass? Would Tartarus share Earth's gravitational constant? Is Tartarus oblong?

Clearly there's much work left to do in the physics of afterlives.