Professor Jopp's Remarkable Feats
Copyright© 2017 by Scriptorius
Chapter 10: Pumped Up
There must be a limit to the number of superlatives that one person can attract in a lifetime, but it seems that boundary has not yet been reached in the case of Professor Ovis Jopp. The lean, seven-foot-two, green-bearded ‘Sage of Trondheim’ was positively incandescent when he addressed yet another invited audience in his fjordside home. Having circulated the contents of a firkin of his now famous greengage wine, the master explained his latest brainwave.
“It was a synthesis,” he said, “and one that only an intellect of cosmic proportions could conceive. For some time, I had been thinking about the crudity of our techniques for leaving the Earth’s gravitational influence. Purely by chance, I heard a joke about an incompetent hoodlum, who was asked how he fared when trying to blow up a rival’s car. He said that he had come to grief by burning his mouth on the exhaust pipe. Obviously he failed to distinguish between blowing up and inflating.”
Calming gales of laughter, Jopp continued: “Yes, it was funny, but I saw beyond the humour. It has long been clear that our attempts to break free from the Earth’s gravity by using absurdly large amounts of chemical propellants are unsatisfactory. Further, I concluded that such methods as plasma and nuclear pulse systems are inadequate. Happily, I found a solution within a week of first addressing the problem.”
Applause was stifled by professorial arm-waves. “It is quite simple,” said the luminous one. “The well-known inverse square law gives the clue. If the size of a body is increased while the mass remains constant, then the surface gravity decreases as the square of the change in radius. I merely applied this to the Earth, realising that if the planet were to double in diameter without significant addition to its mass, then the surface gravitational force would be only a quarter of its present level.”
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