Hi.
I'm curious about this. I saw this:
http://ift.tt/YYS9G1
where it is mentioned a simple experiment by Galileo, wherein you have a hole going through the entire Earth and a ball is dropped, and one sees how it moves. It should oscillate back and forth through the planet forever.
Now, obviously you can't do this full-scale, but at least in theory, you shouldn't need to. According to physics, the period of oscillation depends only upon the density of the gravitator. For most materials, this oscillation period will be roughly in the area of an hour, which is easily observable. So this prediction should be simple enough to test.
So why not place a mini-model with a solid sphere of whatever metal of your choice and a straight hole through it through which drops a small BB out in space (perhaps the ISS could be leveraged for this), and watch?
Now I don't expect anything surprising would be found, but it is, as said, an area which has not yet been tested by a direct observation and so we don't really know for sure. Just as, for example, the experiments being done with anti-matter -- there are experiments going on to try and test as to which direction antimatter falls (i.e. does it fall down, or does it "fall up")? Most likely it falls down, but it hasn't been tested yet and it's considered interesting enough to test anyways despite the reasonable prediction. Why not this?
Any ideas? Or has this already been done now?
I'm curious about this. I saw this:
http://ift.tt/YYS9G1
where it is mentioned a simple experiment by Galileo, wherein you have a hole going through the entire Earth and a ball is dropped, and one sees how it moves. It should oscillate back and forth through the planet forever.
Now, obviously you can't do this full-scale, but at least in theory, you shouldn't need to. According to physics, the period of oscillation depends only upon the density of the gravitator. For most materials, this oscillation period will be roughly in the area of an hour, which is easily observable. So this prediction should be simple enough to test.
So why not place a mini-model with a solid sphere of whatever metal of your choice and a straight hole through it through which drops a small BB out in space (perhaps the ISS could be leveraged for this), and watch?
Now I don't expect anything surprising would be found, but it is, as said, an area which has not yet been tested by a direct observation and so we don't really know for sure. Just as, for example, the experiments being done with anti-matter -- there are experiments going on to try and test as to which direction antimatter falls (i.e. does it fall down, or does it "fall up")? Most likely it falls down, but it hasn't been tested yet and it's considered interesting enough to test anyways despite the reasonable prediction. Why not this?
Any ideas? Or has this already been done now?
via JREF Forum http://ift.tt/1vnFCqe
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