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Where is the geographic center of a state, country or a continent?
It's a question fraught with uncertainty. Do you include water in your calculation? What about islands? What happens when the shoreline shifts?
The U.S. Geological Survey alluded to these complexities in a 1964 report on the centers of states, which opened by stating, "There is no generally accepted definition of geographic center, and no completely satisfactory method for determining it." More recently, various representatives of the agency have given quotes to newspapers saying much the same, hedging.
But to University at Buffalo geologist Peter Rogerson, PhD, the challenge of finding a middle doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
"There are all these people out there saying, 'There's no real good way to do this,'" says Rogerson, a SUNY Distinguished Professor of geography in UB's College of Arts and Sciences. He respectfully disagrees: "As a geographer, my feeling is that if we want to come up with a good way of defining a center, we can and we should."
In a 2015 paper in The Professional Geographer, an academic journal, Rogerson describes a new method for pinpointing the heart of a spatial entity. The approach improves on past techniques, he says, by taking the curvature of the Earth into account appropriately and by identifying geographic centers using a definition that's mathematically sound.
In late 2016, he employed his method to find the heart of North America. The result was serendipitous: According to his calculations, the center of the continent is in a place called Center, a town of 570 people in North Dakota.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 10 2017, @12:08PM
You clearly know a different space from the one that I think we're floating in.
However, my point is that apparently "the concept of center-of-mass is ill-defined in non-Euclidean space" -- http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/swimming_through_empty_space , and that the surface of a sphere such as the earth is non-Euclidean.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday January 10 2017, @07:22PM
I've seen people swimming in the space station (in space). Never seen them swimming in vacuum - and as I pointed out, doing so would violate conservation of momentum.
...ah, read your linked article and see that the "swimmer" is a theoretical construct, not a human swimmer. In fact, it sounds like even if it might actually work, achieving translation with no net change in momentum, the "swimmer" would likely need to operate on a similar scale to the space curvature that it's exploiting. So, not something that's likely to be useful for anything.
It is true that as a mathematical abstraction, the surface of a sphere is indeed non-Euclidian space. However, in our universe that surface is itself inherently embedded in 3D space that's at least flat enough that the non-Euclidian reality can be ignored for most purposes. Basically, most challenges largely disappear if you stop trying to oversimplify the problem.