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As you spin around on a carnival ride, you feel yourself being pulled outward, but all you can do is hang on. Our planet is spinning much faster than that, so why aren’t we all holding on for dear life? Why can’t we feel the Earth’s rotation? Or?
There are two major reasons. One is that the Earth’s rotation is smooth.
“If you’re in a car and you’re driving down the highway at a constant speed, if you close your eyes and tune out the road noise, it will feel like you’re standing still,” he says. Stephanie Deppastronomer and content strategist at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
If the car slams on its brakes repeatedly, you’ll know you’re moving. However, because it maintains a constant speed, it feels like it is not moving.
Related: Can you see the earth rotating?
Put another way, he said, “We know that there is no such thing as absolute motion. Only relative motion matters.” Greg Barrprofessor of physics and optical sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
“People like Newton and Galileo pointed this out,” he says. “Galileo famously imagined a thought experiment in which he was inside a ship. According to the laws of physics, there is a difference between a ship sailing on calm water and a ship anchored in a port. You won’t notice.”
Just like in a car or a boat, everything on Earth moves with us. When you roll down your car window on the highway, your face is filled with wind as the car hits millions of air molecules. However, inside a car with the windows open, you won’t feel the wind because the air moves with you.
Similarly, our planet’s atmosphere is moving as fast as we are, so it is stationary compared to us.
Another reason why we don’t feel the Earth’s rotation is that gravity. “The force of gravity that pulls us closer to Earth is much, much, much stronger than the force that flings us outward,” Deppe said.
The feeling of being pulled outward from a carnival ride or donut car centripetal acceleration. “It’s a sense of inertia,” Gubar says. “Your body wants to keep going in a straight line, but when you’re in a car, the car tries to pull you in a circle.”
The Earth’s rotation pulls everything outward in the same way, but the force that keeps everything attached to the ground outweighs that pull.
“At the Earth’s surface, the acceleration due to gravity is approximately 9.8 m/s^2, but at the equator, where objects move fastest, the acceleration due to the Earth’s rotation is approximately 0.03 m/s^2. Although this is measurable, We don’t notice it because it’s really small compared to what we feel from gravity itself,” Gubar said.
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