New Fundamental Constant of Nature posted 9/30/2007 12:03:22 PM | 0 kudos what's this?     report abuse tagged: pizza, nyc, new york city, physics

koyaanisqatsi

I recently posted about what could possibly be my favorite New York City pizza. SunBabe mentioned that the wonderful smell of my pizza woke her up from a sound sleep 8.75 hours after I ate the pizza.

Since there are 2850 miles between NYC and Nevada, we now have empirical evidence for the speed of pizza smell: 2850 mi / 8.75 hr = 326 mi/hr.

So the speed of pizza smell appears to be 326 miles per hour, very close to the speed of sound, which is about 330 mph, IIRC. In fact, I believe it's close enough that any difference between these numbers can easily be explained by statistical or experimental error.

This raises some interesting questions. Einstein was very fond of using a gedanken experiment to think about something: it's like an experiment without a lab. Your "experiment" is really a thought experiment. We'll engage in that now.

Imagine you live 2 miles from a pizza store and you have a hunger for pizza delivery. You call the pizza parlor and order a large pepperoni pie, a classic pie by anyone's metric.

They make the pie, put it into a box, and give it to the delivery guy. He carries the box to the front door, and opens the door (on his way to the vehicle to deliver the pizza). The moment he opens the door, the smell of pizza begins to travel at the speed of pizza smell towards you (the smell of pizza extends radially in all directions: it has spherical symmetry with no preference of direction).

How long should it take for the smell of pizza to reach you?

2.0 mi / 326 mph = .0061 hours = .37 min = 22 seconds

Interesting. It's probably safe to say that within those 22 seconds, he:

* walks to the car
* fumbles for the keys to the car
* opens the door

Most likely he hasn't even driven the car out from the parking space before you ought to have smelled the pizza. The question is: Why do we not normally smell the pizza before he arrives?

I believe this requires further, heuristic, investigation.

To that end, I plan on performing another pizza experiment in about an hour.

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