[Blunderov]
Does anyone happen to know whether anything like the following experiment has ever been performed?
A mass is weighed, on a very sensitive scale, on the side of the earth that is in front of the Earth's direction of movement through space and then weighed on the side of the earth that is behind it. Of course you wouldn't physically have to move, it would simply be a matter of having a sufficiently sensitive scale and some time to spare.
What I have in mind is this:
If there is a discrepancy, however slight, then we would have measured the gravity of the earth plus, and then minus, it's momentum through space and this would suggest that gravity does in fact emanate, as an attractive force, from the center of a mass.
But if not....
This would imply that the Earth does not suck, it's the universe that blows!
[rhinoceros]
Interesting question. I would say that the Earth sucks, because if the Earth was not there then the Universe would not blow either. But... now that I think of it, it could be that the Universe goes after the Earth and blows at her wherever it finds her. Well... this could be ontological... Sure, that's what it is! Ontological!
Now, about the experiment. I don't know whether anyone has done it, but here is my 2 cents.
- Momentum does not produce any force. Only change of momentum with time can produce a force.
- If we disregard Earth's rotation and consider Earth's orbit around the Sun approximately circular, the magnitude of the momentum would remain constant; only its direction would change with time. So, we would have to add a tiny centrifugal force away from the Sun, the same in both cases.
- If the scale was moving we would also have a Coriolis force, perpendicular to the velocity of the scale -- but this is irrelevant here.
- If we take into acount the elliptic orbit of the Earth around the Sun, then the magnitude of the momentum would also change slightly with time, in a different way at each point along the orbit. In this case, we would have slightly different forces at the two sides of the Earth like the ones you described. I don't know whether this difference would be measurable.
Well, I think I have been a little carried away and I still can't see how this could prove anything.
PS: I hope you have not copyrighted the "Universe blows" idea, because I intend to use it in other discussions.
---- This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25500>
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