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Congrats on solving this symbol! The answer was "5.6 rpm".
For those of you wondering how this answer could be arrived at, here's a quick explanation.
Although using centrifugal force to simulate gravity is often credited to Hermann Potocnik, he didn't publish that idea until 1925. Other possible people who are credited are Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley, but they wrote about their rotating spaceships in the 1950s.
Before these guys, there was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who is often referred to as the father of astronautics and human space flight. In his 1883 work "Free Space" he proposed the idea of a spinning space vehicle that could create a sense of gravity. He even included illustrations of such a vehicle, where the cosmonauts could run around the interior walls. The first clue refers to him and this book.
The 2014 movie Interstellar featured a space ship called the Endurance, which used this concept and spun to create artificial gravity.
There are various RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) shown and mentioned throughout the movie (and they don't agree with one another.) During the docking sequence, TARS mentions that the ship is going 67-68 RPM because of debris from an explosion increasing the ship's angular momentum. If true, this would create a G-force high enough to immediately knock out the entire crew, and soon kill them. Despite that claim, if you time the actual footage, the ship is only shown going at 15-20 RPM, which would have been a very uncomfortable but probably survivable 2-4g.
Production notes and designs from the movie released by Warner Bros show that outside of a crisis, the normal "gravity" setting on the Endurance is meant to be either 5.5 RPM or 5.6 RPM. Folks on the internet particularly like the 5.5 figure when doing physics calculations, so it shows up the most. This isn't necessarily based in scientific fact, it was just a creative choice made for the movie, and given the other measurements we are given the astronauts would have felt the simulated gravity as being a bit higher than Earth's.
For those of you wondering how this answer could be arrived at, here's a quick explanation.
Although using centrifugal force to simulate gravity is often credited to Hermann Potocnik, he didn't publish that idea until 1925. Other possible people who are credited are Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley, but they wrote about their rotating spaceships in the 1950s.
Before these guys, there was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who is often referred to as the father of astronautics and human space flight. In his 1883 work "Free Space" he proposed the idea of a spinning space vehicle that could create a sense of gravity. He even included illustrations of such a vehicle, where the cosmonauts could run around the interior walls. The first clue refers to him and this book.
The 2014 movie Interstellar featured a space ship called the Endurance, which used this concept and spun to create artificial gravity.
There are various RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) shown and mentioned throughout the movie (and they don't agree with one another.) During the docking sequence, TARS mentions that the ship is going 67-68 RPM because of debris from an explosion increasing the ship's angular momentum. If true, this would create a G-force high enough to immediately knock out the entire crew, and soon kill them. Despite that claim, if you time the actual footage, the ship is only shown going at 15-20 RPM, which would have been a very uncomfortable but probably survivable 2-4g.
Production notes and designs from the movie released by Warner Bros show that outside of a crisis, the normal "gravity" setting on the Endurance is meant to be either 5.5 RPM or 5.6 RPM. Folks on the internet particularly like the 5.5 figure when doing physics calculations, so it shows up the most. This isn't necessarily based in scientific fact, it was just a creative choice made for the movie, and given the other measurements we are given the astronauts would have felt the simulated gravity as being a bit higher than Earth's.
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