apparent weight

Jennifer over at Cocktail Party Physics has a nice post about her trip to Disneyland. The one ride that would be fun to play with (in terms of physics) would be the tower of terror. Think of the cool things you could do with a video camera during that ride. It would be like a mini-vomit-comet. Anyway, I want to talk about one part of Jennifer's post. "As one would expect, this lifted us out of our seats slightly, as much as the straps would allow, and we got that one glorious moment of seeming weightlessness, before reaching a jerky stop and being raised back up for another drop." It is…

In my classes, I like to bring up the question: *Why do astronauts float around in space?* The most common response to this question is that they float around because there is no gravity in space. Some people take this a small step further and say that there is no gravity in space because there is no air in space. This is why they claim there is no gravity on the moon (even though there is - more on this later). I like to start off with the concept of gravity. Gravity is an attractive force between any two objects with mass. Your pencil and your dog both have mass so there is a force pulling…