Astrophysics |
Authors: James M. Chappell, David L. Berkahn, Derek Abbott
Terence Tao's airport puzzle asks where a late passenger should spend a short burst of running, or a short pause to tie a shoe, when part of the terminal is a moving walkway.The Galilean answer is to run on the floor and to pause on the belt.The same comparison survives special relativity, with an extra Lorentz factor that makes the belt even less useful as a place to sprint.We recast the belt as the frame-dragging current of a Kerr black hole and ask where to site a terminal if the passenger's proper-time budget is fixed and the gate clock is a static clock in the spacetime.The pedagogical conclusions are: in order to have static concourses we need to site them outside the equatorial ergosphere; lay optional walkways along the zero-angular-momentum congruences; spend the running burst on the static floor; and place the lounges higher up the gravitational potential and not place the gate on the photon orbits.The paper is intended for an undergraduate course that has met special relativity and a first encounter with the Kerr geometry.
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[v1] 2026-09-25 18:42:10
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