Honors Engineering: Week Ten

This week I decided to look into gravity. Gravity is one of those things that we all know about, and usually have a basic understanding of, but I wanted to know a bit more about it.

Gravity is basically a force that keeps you weighted down so you don't float off into space. However, if gravity is too dense, it can actually crush you, (the proof is when people get older and their bones start getting more and more brittle, gravity is actually part of the reason why they start to slouch and "shrink"). How this relates to airplanes is based on where an airplane climbs to.

As we all know, airplanes go several thousand feet into the air before reaching "cruising speed". The reason for this is partially because of gravity density. While the plane isn't so high up people start floating around, it is high enough that it can comfortably move without the constant pressure pushing down on the plane.

A well known myth relating to gravity is that the moon is zero-gravity. This is absolutely not true. The moon has very low gravity, far lower than what we have here on earth, but it does have enough gravity that when astronauts and spaceships land on the moon, they don't immediately go floating off. (This is also why the tape of Neil Armstrong dropping something once he steps on the moon does not prove the the moon landing "wasn't real").