Jon –

Ellen sent me the link to your abstract on fat-bottomed girls, and I felt compelled to point out a critical omission, namely the failure to account for tidal locking.

Tidal locking is the phenomenon whereby the moon’s tidal forces on the earth slow the rotation of both bodies and convert this kinetic energy into potential energy, pushing them further apart, currently at a rate somewhere around an inch a year.  The first tidal lock was the cessation of the moon’s rotation relative to earth, which is why one side of the moon is invisible from earth.  The second tidal lock is the cessation of earth’s rotation, which will occur when the moon is far enough away that it orbits the earth about every 46 days (I believe, it’s been a while since I did the calculations), instead of the current 28 days.  When that happens, the earth’s day will be 46 times as long, and the moon will be permanently invisible to one half of the planet.  Of course, that will require the moon being 1.4 times as far away from the earth as it is now, and at an inch a year the sun will burn out before this happens, barring a change in the rate it happens.  (Actually, the rate changes as the moon gets further away, but not significantly in the next 5 billion years.)

While it is certainly true that fat-bottomed girls do not by themselves make the rockin’ world go ’round, removal of them could cause tidal locking to accelerate.  Obviously, if we simply launch them beyond earth orbit, our planet’s mass will decrease and we will be more vulnerable to tidal locking.  If we launch them at great speed at a slight angle, retrograde to earth’s rotation, the reflex force would compensate for many years of tiday locking, but this strategy would require sending up a number of fat-bottomed girls that increases quadratically over time (actually worse than quadratic, as the earth’s mass starts decresing noticeably.)  Obviously this rate of production of fat-bottomed girls is unsustainable with earth’s natural resources.

Alternatively, we could simply launch them into orbit.  Even most high earth orbits would eventually decay, due to solar wind and various other factors.  The only way to be sure to keep them up is to have them gravitationally coupled with the moon, which, because of tidal locking, isn’t falling on us.  Obviously, sending them to the moon just makes the problem worse, and Lagrange points L1, L2, and L3, which are along the line between the earth and the moon, which makes the tidal problem worse and is only metastable anyway.  Lagrange points L4 and L5, which lead and trail the moon by 60 degrees respectively, are truly stable.  If we launch them to only one of these points, they would cancel out more tidal force than they’d create, but only until they became a substantial fraction of the moon’s mass, at which point the problem gets worse.  By sending them in equal proportions to both L4 and L5, they’d cancel out more lunar tidal force than they’d create until they completely overwhelm lunar tidal force. Of course, long before they exceed the moon’s mass by enough to cause this, they’d create new Lagrange points 60 degrees further away from the moon’s point in orbit. Once those collections gained sufficient mass, we could complete the hexagon and have 6 completely stable sattelites holding each other in orbit without exerting much tidal force (there’d still be some) on the earth.  This would actually preserve the revolution of our rockin’ world without requiring a further and increasing deployment of fat-bottomed girls into orbit.  In fact, we could stop at any point in the process and have a more stable orbital system than the one we started with.

So, it is true we can leverage fat-bottomed girls to preserve the rotation of our planet, but we must do it very carefully, as simply getting rid of them without thought will only make our problems worse.

Chris Snook, Copyright 2004, Some Rights Reserved. Reprinted under the terms set forth at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.

Read the original abstract.

ABSTRACT

This paper will evaluate Freddie Mercury’s assertion that “fat-bottomed girls…make the rockin’ world go ’round” by examining the origins and disposition of the relationship between fat-bottomed girls and the rockin’ world. Do fat-bottomed girls necessarily make the rockin’ world go ’round? Is the rockin’ world made to go ’round only by fat-bottomed girls, or are girls who lack fat bottoms also able to make the rockin’ world go ’round? What makes the rotation of the rockin’ world beholden in particular to the presence fat-bottomed girls?

To answer these questions, it will be necessary to examine the very nature of the rockin’ world: is it separate from the non-rockin’ world? We find that cataclysmic geological and astronomical events would transpire if the rockin’ world and the non-rockin’ world rotated at different rates.

We can infer that, because the rockin’ world cannot possibly be physically separate from the non-rockin’ world, any force instrumental in the rotation of the rockin’ world would of necessity be similarly instrumental in the rotation of the non-rockin’ world. Science has, over the last four hundred years, determined that the world, rockin’ and otherwise, rotates at the mercy of a number of physical forces as part of a deterministic system, and that this system behaves the same way regardless of the presence of fat-bottom girls. We must therefore conclude that Freddie Mercury’s assertion is flawed. Some concession may, however, be made for rhetorical hyperbole, and it has been established that the participation of fat-bottomed girls in the creative process of rock music is a material benefit enjoyed by those who have acheived success in the rockin’ world.

See Chris Snook’s rebuttal.