Why can’t we feel the earth rotating ?
In: Physics
The Earth is very large. So even though it’s rotating at a thousand miles an hour at the equator if you think of it as linear velocity It takes an entire day to go around once.
If you were on a merry-go-round that went around once a day you wouldn’t feel it rotating either.
So it’s very big but it moves at the speed of a clock, and not a normal clock but a 24-hour clock instead of a 12-hour clock.
Technically you weigh ever so slightly less at the equator than you do at the North Pole because of ~~centripetal~~ centrifugal force. but because the Earth is so huge the total angle you change in direction is so tiny that it’s less than a percent difference.
Finally the Earth’s movement is very smooth and continuous. if you’re in an airplane you don’t feel like you’re moving 500 miles an hour because the airplane is moving 500 miles an hour continuously. The car you don’t feel like you’re doing 60 unless you’re turning or going over bumps or something. I mean you do feel it when the car speeds up and slows down but the Earth doesn’t do that.
So the Earth never changes direction, and the Earth never changes velocity, and your sensation of movement is based entirely on changes in direction and velocity
It’s not impossible for an organism to feel these forces in theory, but in practice any organism that evolved to feel the motion of the Earth would go crazy. Such a sense would do you no good.
EDIT: and before the pea dance descend, you on the surface of the Earth undergo a continuous change in velocity as the Earth rotates, abet a tiny and slow one. The earth itself does not undergo a change in velocity. It’s angular momentum is conserved and it’s total velocity as annular consistency.
And for simplicity’s sake I am ignoring the continuous change in direction caused by the motion of the earth around the sun, and the motion of the sun around the galaxy center.
All-motion being relative, some vectors are unimportant in some discussions.
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