There is a serious scientific flaw in your sample MTKup. The sample does not take into consideration density. A sample of lead of the same volume will yield significantly different results.
Solution: Obtain a sample that more closely resembles the Earths contents. My estimation is that you’ll need to cut out a piece roughly 2 kilometers cubed. If you could extract it starting at my obnoxiously loud neighbors house, I would really appreciated it.
Thanks foolsguinea–I can never sort those two out without looking it up.
And JackPunch, I think fool covered this, but no momentum doesn’t figure into the formula. If you know speed and radius, you have all you need to figure this formula. It is a measure of accelleration (like gravity) and applies equally to all objects regardless of mass/weight.
I think you people are missing the point. Air not weighing anything makes as much sence as holding the scale and puting the earth ina ziplock…geez…some people
Yeah, I’m not sure if anyone addressed this before, but what you might be missing is the air pressure on the earth. What you need to do is create a vaccuum around the scale… That way the air pressure won’t affect the scale. Then you can stand on your head and use the glass table or whatever else… I don’t remember it all. You might want to use a space suit though, because you don’t want your face to fly off during the measurements.
[humor]
Oh, I believe it DOES take ‘density’ into account, just not the density of the SOIL… 
[/humor]
“And btw, I’m (almost) certain that Achernar was joking about air having no weight”
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Chronos, but I admit nothing! (Except that nobody has ever been accused of being humorless for not getting one of my jokes.) So, in the interest of clearing this up, I’ve got a simple experiment you can try at home, that will let you see that empty space has a negative weight:
[List=1]
[li]Take an ordinary household scale. (The scientifically calibrated ones won’t work, because when France and Germany were bickering about the tenth decimal place of the value of the Kilogram, everyone just said “Screw it” and made up their own standards, which are all wrong. The only place you can find scales that are actually right anymore is Wal*Mart.)[/li][li]Weigh 1 (one) neutron star, a star which has collapsed to extreme densities, thereby removing all its empty space. You will find that it’s “pretty darn heavy”.[/li][li]Weigh an ordinary star, like Saturn. You’ll see that it’s “rather darn heavy”, quite a bit lighter than the neutron star.[/li][/List=1]
So, why does an ordinary star have so much less weight than a neutron star? Because ordinary stars are so full of empty space, that a good amount of negative weight is added. Does that make sense?
Oh, and by the way, for anyone who’s actually still reading this thread for the OP, I’d like to help clear up the answer. There are no measurements that have to be made in order to learn that the Earth is missing mass. It’s a result of Relativity (Chronos mentioned General, but I did all the calculations, only knowing Special, so I don’t know which branch). Special Relativity says that Energy and Mass are equivalent. If you take away something’s Energy, you take away its Mass. Dropping something into a gravitational field, like the Earth, is a good way of taking away something’s Energy. I didn’t read the attached article, but if it only mentions the Earth, then it’s kind of deficient, because any celestial body will have the same property of “missing mass”.
Am I the only one that could this?
And I though the only star in our solar system was the SUN.
Stupid canadian education system…DAMN YOU!!
Let’s see what we can do with Achernar’s statements.
I’m pretty sure Pizzle’s right. I don’t think Saturn’s a star, but I could look it up.
Proving that empty space has negative weight is easy, and it doesn’t involve weighing stars (neutron or otherwise). Weigh an airtight container that is currently filled with air. Then suck out as much air as possible, and weigh it again with near-total vacuum inside. It weighs less. Therefore, in our atmosphere, empty space registers on a scale as negative weight, because it is lighter than air (just as hydrogen gas or helium gas will register as negative weight for the same reason).
But who says the earth loses any gravity just because you break it into smaller pieces? Sure each piece will have much less gravity than the whole earth, but they still have gravity. The force of gravity is directly proportional to mass, so the sum total of gravity of all the individual pieces must be equal to the whole.
I’m going to respond to the only part that I think (hope) was meant seriously, Son Tinh:
If you meant to say “gains any mass” rather than “loses any gravity”, then the answer is Einstein, or more notably, anyone who accepts Relativity (IE. Almost every Physicist today). No, it doesn’t make sense, but when you see “Relativity” you should think “counter-intuitive”. If you’re in a rocketship on Earth, you have a certain amount of mass. If you fly out to interstellar space, you will gain mass, as prescribed by Relativity. If you do that with a chunk of the Earth, it will gain mass. If you do that with every piece of the Earth, one at a time, the total amount of mass that all the pieces will gain is some 2 Trillion tons. If you’d like a more in-depth discussion, just tempt me. 
No, Saturn is not a star. Duh.
Going waaaaaay back, if you really wanted to escape the centripital force of the earth, go to the poles, not the equator. At the equator, the earth rotates at roughly 1000 mph. At the poles (the axis of rotation/where all lines of longitude meet) the speed is darn close to zero, but that’s the true poles, not the magnetic ones. But as we already know, centripital force is negligable, as is tilt on it’s axis.
In weighing the earth, you do have to account for all the people, birds, planes, and insects because they are all formed from pre-existing matter. Remember to HS physics, matter can neither be created or destroyed. It can change form. For instance, take raw materials and make a plane of the same weight, roughly, considering some matter is transformed into scrap and what not, but the weight of the before and after in an isolated system hasn’t changed. Babies take the place of months of food. Of course the food taken in weighs a heck of alot more than new borns, but the extra weight is excreted as some peoples brain matter; crap.
Air has weight. If you were to suck the air out of the container, you would be sucking out particles in the air, as well as the weight of the oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and other imputities. All those weights removed would mean the object would be lighter.
To explain the airplane theory better, the airplanes create lift by forcing air down under their wings, towards the ground. The force on the ground, which is spread over unbelievable areas, is equal to the plane’s weight. Likewise with birds.
But while we are being technical, a talking scale wouldn’t work because the sound is admitted through the side of the scale where the object to be weighed would be placed, i.e. the earth. The sound waves would create a thrusting force, much in the same way heavy bass from large speakers shakes the ground. That would throw off accuracy by maybe .00001% Back to the drawing board.
If I may take you up on the last point. The lift on a plane or bird wing is not caused by the wing forcing air downwards. There may be some downward air movement but this is NOT the cause of the lift.
Cut a section from a wing and you will find it is blunt at the forward end and sharp at the back end. The top surface is not the same shape as the bottom surface. The principle is that the wing moves forward through the air and the air over the top is displaced further than the air underneath. In effect the air above is shoved out of the way by the front edge and as the back edge tapers away the air can’t rush back fast enough to fill the gap. This causes a partial vaccuum above the wing whilst underneath the wing the air is hardly displaced at all. The pressure below the wing is greater than the pressure above it and in order to equalise the pressures the air exerts an upward force on the wing. It is air’s INERTIA, ie it’s inability to rush back quickly that causes the lift.
If a plane passed close over your head you might feel some disturbance but this is turbulance, not the weight of the plane being transferred to your head and the surroundings. You are making the mistake of seeing lift as the same thing as a water skier uses on water. That is somewhat different.
In fact, when flying, the plane is supported by the energy from it’s fuel using the inertia of the air and the almost accidental effect of the pressure differential that it’s motion creates. In flight a plane exerts no “Weight” on the earth. It’s weight is negated by the energy from it’s fuel. Stop burning the fuel and see what happens!
It’s the same with rockets. The blast of hot gas “Pushing” against the air behind has no relevance whatsoever. It is the pressure of the gas still inside the rocket motor pushing UP on the inside of the motor which lifts it. The gas going out the back may be pushing against the air outside but that doesn’t help the rocket, it’s simply a spectacular by-product. Same old pressure differential principle. Where the gas can escape out the back it’s free to go whereas inside the motor it’s trying to escape upwards, thus pushing the rocket. Sideways of course it balances out both ways.
Can we get this distributing weight on air argument out of the way please…
Chas123456789, welcome to the board. How airplanes fly was discussed extensively in this thread and I was convinced beyond any doubt that a wing displaces air downwards and is supported by the reaction to that motion. I am not going to go over the entire thing again but there are some interesting links for you in that thread.
So it was you who leapt from the end of a pier with two wooden boards strapped to your arms was it?
Orville and Wilbur had it wrong then, as did Barnes-Wallace, Heinkel, Howard Hughes and innumerable others.
Incidentally if you are bored with the argument why did you bother posting?
I think you misread, Chas123456789. Sailor didn’t say he was bored (although he may have been), we welcomed you to the board. This message board.
Then he supplied a helpful link to a thread where the topic you discussed received top billing.
Darn nice of him, no?
I also welcome you to the board.
Oh I know, and thanks, but sometimes one has to be controversial… incidentally I was previously in this thread somewhere, maybe the weight of the missing thread is significant? Does this have anything to do with relativity and “String” theory?
Please accept my apologies if the attempt at humour was shall we say clumsy.
I suppose whichever way,(and both sides are right to some degree), the plane IS supported by the air around it and as such has the effect of being a denser part of the whole atmosphere. In other words while it’s flying, the planes becomes part of the atmosphere, so in effect makes the atmosphere a little heavier. So maybe you wouldn’t feel the weight of millions or planes, but the atmospheric pressure would go up since you have made the air a little denser.
Over to you.
Wow, this BOARD got serious quick didn’t it. Sorry all you people looking for humor here. I take responsibility for that.
Anywho…The wing thing is correct the other way it was announced. Being a sophmore in high school, I am not a rocket scientist, nor an aviation specialist, but I did know that a rocket engine was propelled by the pressure inside, not outside. Otherwise, how would a shuttle move in a darn near zero pressure environment…i.e. space? I don’t perfectly remember the equation, but it has to do with the weight of whatever is flying divided by the amount of fuel/propellant being expelled per unit time, and i think density might be in there, but I’m not sure. Correct me if I am wrong.
I did not know that turbine engines worked in a similar manner. I thought air was sucked in, heated, and blown out, or is that a jet engine?
To demonstrate what the other theory was, take a sheet of printer paper, or any 8.5 x 11 paper and make a strip about 2 x 11. Hold one end to your bottom lip and blow over the top. What happens? The paper lifts. Because the law pressure creates a vacuum, we know the rest. But the physical earth gets lighter, and the atmosphere gets heavier, so it balances out.
Anyway, remember, sophmore in HS, already took the SAT’s twice with John Hopkins University, last time was in eigth grade, got 1130…beat out 65% of college-bound seniors, yadda yadda, but I don’t pretend to know everything. So if someone could clear up the difference between jet and turbine, I’d appreciate it.
BTW, maybe there should be a separate topic for this, as this is supposed to be “Is the earth missing weight”…
Yes it is, 100,000,000 tons each year because of space debris. That stuff is heavy. This is moronmountian, signing out. On a school night, need my sleep.
Whoa, Nellie! Stop the presses! Hold the phone! (insert trite interjective phrases here as you like) I just went to the antipodes of the original scale experiment, repeated the experiment, and got the same answer. This is earth-shattering (no pun intended)!
Since I was on the opposite side of the earth, this can only mean that the earth is actually pushing outward with 5 pounds of force all over its surface. We need to recalculate the missing mass to include this force factored over the surface area of the earth. Does anybody know the math for this? I suppose I may have overlooked some periodic sinusoidal oscillation vectors, but I think I’m on to something here.
Of course, this whole finding leaves me with somewhat of a feeling of je n’est sais qua (proving that more than one can play this erudition through foreign phrases game).
Hi y’all,
I know the air weight post was a joke, but air does in fact ‘weigh’ nothing. The reason for this is that the density of weighee relative to the air or whatever it is in effects how much it weighs. The air being weighed has the same density of the air it is in (unless its pressure is increased, of course). This means the weighee is neutrally bouyant with the air around it which translates to the weight = 0. If the weighee is heated or cooled or the pressure changes, the weight would decrease or increase.
I really hope this post makes sense, I’ve been awake for 48 hours because of my job (hauling dead bodies).
-Fox