Gravity - crap on a cracker

[Pigeon]

Spy66 posted on 10/20/2012 @ 06:52

How would the earths gravitational force effect a mass inside a vacuume that runs from N to S?
The vacuume or the 10kg mass will never see the force/mass working on the out side walls of this tunnel.

If you built a vacuume tunnel that runs from the North pole throught earths center and to the South Pole. And on the North Pole you placed a 10kg weight into the vacuume tunnel. Would the weight fall/travel to the South Pole?

My teacher/Professor tells me that the 10kg weight would fall to the South Pole. I am telling him that the 10kg weight would not travel anywhere.

Here is someone who thinks a vacuum negates the force of gravity. I don't know what to think.

Teacher of the Year....lol

[Royal]

How would the earths gravitational force effect a mass inside a vacuume that runs from N to S?
The vacuume or the 10kg mass will never see the force/mass working on the out side walls of this tunnel.

If you built a vacuume tunnel that runs from the North pole throught earths center and to the South Pole. And on the North Pole you placed a 10kg weight into the vacuume tunnel. Would the weight fall/travel to the South Pole?

My teacher/Professor tells me that the 10kg weight would fall to the South Pole. I am telling him that the 10kg weight would not travel anywhere.

[Royal]

I shouldn't criticize too much. I don't know either. Maybe some google searches, wikipedias, and common sense can bring some light to the problem.

[Pigeon]

People seem to be split between it ending up in the center of the Earth or oscillating back and forth between the poles.

Bring Richard Feynman back from the grave.

[Pigeon]

A few words from Richard Feynman

Feynman devoted the latter half of his book What Do You Care What Other People Think? to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative.

Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected.

His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard the shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 100.

He concluded that the space shuttle reliability estimate by NASA management was fantastically unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that NASA used these figures to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program.

He warned in his appendix to the commission's report (which was included only after he threatened not to sign the report), "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

[Royal]

Most would like to hear a 1 in 100,000 chance rather than 1 in 100. Either way, I bet you can get thousands of teachers to sign up for a 1 in 10 chance. I think the destination of space trumps all terrestrial goals. A public space program will make big money and people will save up, or finance it, like a car.

[Royal]

Do you know anything about gravity?

[Pigeon]

Given the number of shuttle flights and disasters, that 1-100 was about right.

Gravity, about as much as the average person who attended science class.