Ducks and science

I came across a question on a website that asked, "How long would it take to fall through the Earth?"

Apparently this question has been posed to students for a very long time, although I personally do not remember such a question in my classes. The questions we were asked were much more practical, like "If you borrow your grandparents' Lincoln Town Car and you are driving along Main Street at 45 miles an hour and a duck crosses the road 65 feet in front of you" (there were a lot of ducks where I grew up, though not so many Lincoln Town Cars), "do you have duck soup for dinner that night?"

Of course the answer depended not only on math and science but also on whether the driver wanted duck soup. We were used to debating such important topics in Mr. K's class. He often lamented that we, his advanced class, were incapable of properly pronouncing the color "magenta," instead saying "magneta." Of course we could say it the right way, but it was much more rewarding to watch Mr. K shake his head in sorrow when we didn't. It also postponed the actual lesson we were supposed to be working on.

But back to falling through the Earth. I confess that this is a question that does not keep me up at night. Those are more likely to be things like "Did the online sale at The Loft end yesterday, or do I still have time to buy stuff?"

But apparently the answer that was accepted for years about how long it would take one to fall from one side of the Earth to the other -- and which was taught to countless gullible students, some of whom probably cannot pronounce magenta -- was 42 minutes, 12 seconds. But this has been recently disputed, and we now know that for a variety of scientific reasons, all of which ignore the improbability of digging 7,918 miles through the center of the Earth, such a trip actually would be, according to one source, "much quicker." 38 minutes, 11 seconds, to be precise.

Now that we know the truth -- unless we find out that this number, too, is incorrect -- we can turn to the next pressing question: If a duck wanders down this shaft into the center of the Earth, will it have enough time to get out of the way of a Lincoln Town Car?