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At Quantastic, we love to explore science, tech, and math vis-à-vis humanity. Our mission is to bring scientific knowledge, exploration, and debate through compelling stories to interested readers. Each story seeks to educate, inspire curiosity, and motivate critical thinking.

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Numerical Free Physics Intuition: Is It Faster to Fall Through the Earth or Orbit to the Other Side?

21 min readMar 29, 2025

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Figure 1: The Shuttle Radar Topology Mission, a collaboration between the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, www.dlr.de), ASI (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, www.asi.it/) and NASA, used radar ranging to produce a complete, detailed topographical map of our home between 60º latitude North and 56º South with a lateral resolution of 30 meters. Axial resolution is difficult to define: averaged over the 30m×30m region that the radar probe reflects from, the resolution is a few centimeters (
: public domain illustration copyright Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt / NASA

Figure 1: The Shuttle Radar Topology Mission, a collaboration between the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, ), ASI (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, ) and , used radar ranging to produce a complete, detailed topographical map of our home between 60º latitude North and 56º South with a lateral resolution of 30 meters. Axial resolution is difficult to define: averaged over the 30m×30m region that the radar probe reflects from, the resolution is a few centimeters (hundredths to tenths of the wavelength). This means that if one low pass filters the terrain by a low pass filter with 30m×30m Fourier kernel, the resulting shape can be resolved within centimeters. Each interferogram point is the altitude averaged over the 30m×30m region around the point.

I have a VERY long history of solving physics problems — mainly electromagnetic field simulation as well as, in later years, numerical relativity as my confidence in numerical processing strengthened and i knew that i could…

The Quantastic Journal
The Quantastic Journal

Published in The Quantastic Journal

At Quantastic, we love to explore science, tech, and math vis-à-vis humanity. Our mission is to bring scientific knowledge, exploration, and debate through compelling stories to interested readers. Each story seeks to educate, inspire curiosity, and motivate critical thinking.

Selena Ballerina
Selena Ballerina

Written by Selena Ballerina

Witch. Crazy Cat Lady. Cuddle Slut. Mad Scientist. Read at your own risk.

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