Physics humor
I’m reading Bicycling Science, and it’s quite a good book although a bit thick in places. It’s definitely a text book, but interesting in any case.
A quote from page 153, from a paragraph labeled Energy consumption as a function of distance, in a chapter entitled Power and speed:
We can see from figure 4.12 that a bicyclist racing at 9 m/s (20 mile/h) could travel more than 574 km/l (1,350 mile/U.S. gallon) if there were a liquid food with the energy content of gasoline. (Milk is mostly water but has enough energy to take a racing bicyclist about 40 km/l (95 mile/gal), so bicyclists could help to solve America’s supposed energy shortage and milk surpluses simultaneously.)
Result!
However, as has been pointed out, there is a fuel that has as much energy as gasoline. Or nearly. It’s called ethanol or, colloquially, “whisky”.
