Why can’t we feel the earth rotating ?

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Why can’t we feel the earth rotating ?

In: Physics

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The other answers have gone over the mechanics of why, but there’s another aspect of this: how could you tell?

The earth spins at a constant rate. This gives a centrifugal acceleration, but it’s *always* had that acceleration throughout your entire life. The reason you can tell the motion of a merry-go-round is because you’ve also experienced *not* being on it, so you can tell the difference. But for the rotation of the earth, it’s just ‘normal’.

And *then* there’s the fact that it’s tiny (0.3% of gravity at most) and in roughly the opposite direction of gravity. But while it’s not perceivable with your own senses, there are ways of detecting it like [Foucault’s pendulum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault_pendulum).

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