The Science Behind Goodnight Moon

Nicholas, as we may have mentioned, has been on a book kick the last few weeks ("book!" is his new favorite word).  And his favorite, especially at bedtime, has been the children's classic Goodnight Moon.  Having read it almost every night for the past three weeks, I sometimes find my mind wandering a bit, until eventually I noticed that the clocks in the room where the little bunny has to say goodnight to everything—including "nobody"—have reasonable times on them through the book, from 7:00 p.m. to about 8:10 p.m.  That seemed an awful long time to say goodnight, even if you do enumerate the comb and the brush.

Anyway, the point is that I then found through Andrew Sullivan's blog a scientific analysis of the passage of time in Goodnight Moon.  Based on the size of the moon in each of the images above and its movement, Chad Orzel calculates that about six minutes elapse during the time of the book.  Which doesn't exactly match the clocks.  I'll let Orzel tell you the rest:

These two methods clearly do not agree with one another, which means one of two things: either I'm terribly over-analyzing the content of the illustrations of a beloved children's book, or the bunny's bedroom is moving at extremely high velocity relative to the earth, so that relativistic time dilation makes the six-minute rise of the moon appear to take an hour and ten minutes. Calculating the necessary velocity is left as an exercise for the interested reader.