A Mystery
What a simple proposition: if you have a certain mass, and you lose some of that mass, then you should weigh less on a scale. Now I suppose complications may arise. Here’s my mystery: I weigh, I then use the restroom in a manner that requires sitting, and then I return to the scale… and I weigh one pound more than I did just a few minutes ago! Thoughts? I can assure the gentle reader that the apparent mass loss involved is quite substantial.
Filed under: The Diet by Holland A. Sullivan, Jr. |
Gravity.
Comment on January 25, 2006 @ 9:03 pm
??
Is it because my mass has redistributed itself in a way that lowers my center of gravity? Would that affect my weight at all? I presume weight is a measure of the earth’s gravitational pull on my mass against the springs in a scale. Also, the farther you are from an object, the less its gravity affects you (and the less my gravity affects it.) But if my center of mass moves closer to the scale, then in theory I could weigh more. But shouldn’t such movements result in only imperceptible weight increases?
Comment on January 27, 2006 @ 11:25 am