Query inre: Mission Of Gravity by Hal Clement redux

[thebigcat]

I originally posted this in the Science Fiction forum, but am reposting it here on the suggestion of another poster. <b>jmilsom</b> specifically said that some of you SS&A types would love to tackle this problem.<br /><br />NASA's stargazer Q&A page synopsizes the book thusly: <br /><br />"Many years ago Hal Clement (real name, Harold Clement Stubbs) wrote a wonderful work of science fiction titled "Mission of Gravity", about a planet made of very dense and enormously strong material. The planet rotated extremely fast, and its equatorial radius was several times its polar radius. Gravity at the equator was weakened by the centrifugal force and by the greater distance from the center, to where a human could land there. However, regions closer to the pole were habitable only to local creatures, many-legged squat crawlers (highly intelligent, too). Even they had trouble reaching the pole, where the mission of the book takes them." <br /><br />I have some trouble with the basic premise. Clement's fictional super-jovain world Mesklin has an effective surface gravitation ranging between 3 Gs at the poles and nearly 700 Gs at the equator. When a friend told me of this book several years ago I almost immediately told him that Clement was wrong. (You can guess what reaction that comment earned) It seemed obvious to me that no matter how much spin imparted on a planet it would always order it's mass so that the effective gravity at it's surface (Expressed as a balance between lateral acceleration and gravemetric acceleration) was constant. <br /><br />I did some web searching, and according to an article in space.com Clement was informed by students at MIT (probably taught by the same professor who's students were running around the World Sci Fi convention screaming "The Ringworld is unstable" the year after Larry Nivin won the Hugo for writing his classic.) that they had reworked his original slide-rule calculations with their speffy supercomputers and found that his planet <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[exoscientist]

An interesting question. You might get more response on it on sci.physics or sci.physics.research.<br /><br /> Bob Clark<br /><br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>