This one has had me stumped for years. Imagine being in a very sturdy air-conditioned spherical pod right at the centre of the Earth. Now, you have equal amounts of mass pulling on you from every side, so the gravitational attraction should equal out, and you should be weightless, just floating around in the pod. Could that be right? But if weightlessness rules at the Earth's centre, then how does that affect the enormous pressure that's supposed to be down there.
And how does this weightlessness tie in with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which says that mass curves space, which causes the gravity effect? Does that mean all that mass unwinds the curvature at the centre of massive objects like the Earth.
2007-03-27
17:09:48
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16 answers
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asked by
Anonymous