What Is Weightlessness?
Do you have weight in space? Is weightlessness an absence of gravity, or actually an absence of forces pushing against it? Andy unpicks what weight really is. Watch our experiments with water...
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Our recent CHRISTMAS LECTURES were all about human space travel. So obviously we had to talk about zero-g and weightlessness, which are some of the most fundamental experiences of being in space. This led to some discussion in the office about what weight is. I thought it'd be good to unpick in a video some of the issues that came up, because actually I think there's a lot of subtlety, dare I say it some confusion, in the way people talk about the physics of weight. One of the biggest misunderstandings is around the use of the term 'weightlessness', which lots of people assume means that in space you don't have any weight. But this isn't true. This misunderstanding isn't because the definition of weight is confusing at all. It...
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Our recent CHRISTMAS LECTURES were all about human space travel. So obviously we had to talk about zero-g and weightlessness, which are some of the most fundamental experiences of being in space. This led to some discussion in the office about what weight is. I thought it'd be good to unpick in a video some of the issues that came up, because actually I think there's a lot of subtlety, dare I say it some confusion, in the way people talk about the physics of weight. One of the biggest misunderstandings is around the use of the term 'weightlessness', which lots of people assume means that in space you don't have any weight. But this isn't true. This misunderstanding isn't because the definition of weight is confusing at all. It...
