9.78 seconds
Michael Grecco. Fastest Man on Earth: Tim Montgomery.
Fastest Man on Earth: Tim Montgomery
It was a world record kind of day in Paris. The final race of the 2002 season, a whisper of a tailwind. Years of weight training, testing shoes and suits, poring over computer models, and running, running, running, all funneled down to 100 meters. Tim Montgomery saw only what was in front of him. He heard nothing. Silence. Focus. Pop. The gun sounded and he exploded off the start, sprinting the way the rest of us breathe. Rhythmic. Automatic. He leeeeaned into the tape, and 9.78 seconds after he started, it was over. He'd set a new benchmark by .01 second - about the time it takes for a bullet to leave a gun barrel. His secret? Start young. The 28-year-old grew up cutting his parents' 7-acre South Carolina lawn - with a push mower. It strengthened his legs. "By the time I finished one side," he says, "the other side would already be growing."
Ian white. Fastest Radio-Controlled Car: RC 10L30.
Fastest Radio-Controlled Car: RC 10L30
At rest, Cliff Lett's "other car" is just a 3-inch-high molded plastic toy. At 111 mph, it's a blur. As head designer at Team Associated, the top manufacturer of radio-controlled vehicles, Lett spent just five days modifying a standard RC10 L3 to nearly double the world record in 2001s. The car features a gear drive, a two-turn brushless motor with 24 sub-C NiCad batteries, and hydraulic shocks - all packed into a one-tenth scale carbon-fiber chassis. Lett's biggest design challenge: keeping the tires on the rims at 15,000 rpm. Now Lett thinks he can hit 130 mph. "You need 1 horsepower to go 100 mph, 2 horsepower to go 110," he says. "It's all about power, and punching a smaller hole in the air."
- J.M.O.
Fastest Men in the Air: Al Joersz and George Morgan
"I think we could have comfortably flown to Mach 3.4," says Al Joersz. "Beyond that it's pretty risky." That kind of modesty - and a really fast jet - is the stuff of records. On a July day in 1976, Joersz and George Morgan flew the SR-71 Blackbird 2,193.16 mph, which no one has touched since. These days, Joersz, a deputy director at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, checks out the latest experimental planes - and tears up the California desert on four-wheelers with his kids. What does his DMV record look like? "I got a couple of tickets in my 240Z," he says. "But I wasn't really going all that fast."
- Joseph Portera
Lloyd Ziff. Fastest Men Anywhere: Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan.
Fastest Men Anywhere: Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan
Tom Stafford wasn't all that impressed when he and his Apollo 10 crewmates - John Young and Gene Cernan - returned from a 1969 moon-scouting trip and hit 28,547 mph just as they reached Earth's upper atmosphere. Seems you can't feel speed in space. But then the fireworks began. "All you could see was red out the window," Stafford says in his Oklahoma drawl, recalling the craft's outer shell burning off as deceleration hit. "After you've been in zero g for eight days, you really feel half a g," he says. NASA knew the astronauts could take it. But this was a test of the heat shields. They passed.
- Mark Robinson
Fastest Man-Made Object: Voyager 1
Every 3.8 minutes, NASA's Voyager 1 probe travels the distance between New York and California. That comes to 1 million miles every 24 hours, a 38,518-mph pace that makes the 1-ton cruiser the fastest man-made object in space. Launched in 1977 to delve far into the cosmos, Voyager 1 is two to three years away from reaching "termination shock," a spot where the outward blowing solar winds that dominate the planetary orbits meet inward moving stellar forces. From there, scientists will finally be able to accurately map and describe deep space.
- Alix Berger
Christian Richters. Fastest Particle Accelerator: Large Hadron Collider.
Fastest Particle Accelerator: Large Hadron Collider
Call it the ultimate nuclear drag strip. When completed in 2005, CERN's Large Hadron Collider will send protons and ions from hydrogen nuclei rushing through a 17-mile circular tunnel at speeds of up to 52,200,000 miles per hour. Like many daredevils, these super-accelerated particles will meet a violent end, crashing into one another head-on. Scientists study their wreckage to unlock the secrets of the subatomic universe. Many believe that the LHC, which stretches 250 feet beneath the ground along the border of France and Switzerland, will soon solve the mystery of the so-called God Particle and help explain the big bang.
- Chris Baker
James Cope. Fastest Computer: Earth Simulator.
Fastest Computer: Earth Simulator
This room may look like the set of a '70s sci-fi flick, but its contents are state of the art. Japan's Earth Simulator, a collection of 5,120 CPUs linked by 1,700 miles of cable, was turned on in 2002 and runs 35.8 trillion floating-point operations per second. That's five times faster than its nearest rival, IBM's ASCI Q, and the rest of the top five American supercomputers combined. Dubbed Computenik in honor of the thunder-stealing Sputnik, the $400 million number-cruncher collects data from around the globe to predict planetary changes like el Niéo, earthquakes, and global warming.
- C.B.
