In the autumn of 1912, the ocean linear
Olympic, one of the world's biggest ships at the time, was steaming ahead out in the high seas, when another much smaller ship, the cruiser
Hawk, rapidly approached it on a parallel course a hundred meters away.
As soon as the two ships took up a position where one pointed the other, a surprising thing happened. the
Hawk sharply veered off its course, as if obeying some invisible force, turned the big liner and heedless of the helm rammed into it.The impact was so great that it made a big gash in the
Olympic's hull.
A tribunal examined this queer case and found the Olympic's Skipper guilty, as, according to its ruling, he had failed to issue orders to yield the right of passage to
Hawk. Consequently, the tribunal, as you can gather, saw nothing extra ordinary about it at all, attributing the the accident to the skipper's negligence.
Actually this was the result of a totally unforeseen cicumstance, a case of mutual attractions of ships at sea and the answer lies in basic physics.
Why do ships attract one another ?
Labels: funphysics, logic, thinktank