Article

WEIGHT AND MASS

Weight and weightlessness
Perhaps nothing is so ingrained in our senses as the perpetual pulling of
the earth on our surroundings. Its always there, never changing. Its been hugging
solids, liquids and gases to the earths surface for over 4 billion years. Earths
gravity is built into our descriptions of our world with words like up, down, and
weight.
Exactly what is weight? A weight is a force, nothing more. Your weight is
the pull of earths gravity on your body. Likewise, the weight of your car is the
force of the earths attraction for it. The greater the mass is, the larger the
attraction. Two identical pickup trucks weigh exactly twice as much as one. But
mass and weight are not the same; they are measures of two different things,
inertia and force. For example, consider the rocks brought from the moons
surface by astronauts. Because of the Earths stronger gravitational attraction,
these rocks weigh more on Earth, about six times as much as they weighed on the
moon. But their mass, their resistance to a change in velocity, is still the same;
they have the same quantity of matter on earth as they did on the moon.
Even though weight and mass are not the same, most of us do not make a
distinction between them, suppose someone hands you two books and asks which
is the more massive. Almost certainly you would weigh one in each hand
choose the heavier book. Thats okay, because the heavier one does have more
mass. But if the two books were on a smooth table, you could just push each book
back and forth to see which has the larger inertia. (Their weights dont come into
play, being balanced by upward pushes from the table).
Even then, pointing to the one thats harder to accelerate, you might from
habit still say That one is heavier. The point here is that one is harder to
accelerate only because it has greater mass. An astronaut could pick up a large
rock on the moon with much less force than required on earth. But if the astronaut
shoved the rock in a horizontal direction, it would take just as much of a push to

accelerate it at, say, 5 feet/second2 as it would take on earth. There is a difference

between weight and mass. To measure your weight you can use a bathroom scale,
which is a spring that stretches if it is pulled (or compresses if it is pushed). As
you step onto the scale, the springs pointer register a larger and larger force
until you are at rest, supported entirely by the scale. The scale then shows you
how much force (from the spring) balances gravitys pull on your mass, and this
force is equal to your weight. If you step down and drink two cups of coffee and
then step back on the scale, youll weigh about 1 pound more. But suppose some
fellow strapped a small scale to his feet and jumped from the top of the stepladder.
You can imagine what would happen, although you should not actually try it.
While he was falling, the scale would fall with him- it wouldnt support him, and
he couldnt press against it. In this situation, the scale would show a reading of
zero. Gravitys pull would still be there, of course, pulling on him as he fell. He
would still have weight, the pull of gravity on his body. Its just that nothing
would stop that fall, there would be no supporting force opposing the gravitational
pull, so he would feel weightless. To jump with a scale would be awkward (and
dangerous). But if you strap on a small backpack stuffed with books and hop
down from a chair, you can feel the packs weight vanish from the shoulder straps
while you are falling. Perhaps, youve jumped piggyback with a friend into a
swimming pool. If your friend is on your back and you jump, your friends weight
disappears from your back while the two of you are in midair. Nevertheless, the
weight of your friend doesnt disappear; it causes your friend to accelerate right
along with you, at the rate of g, towards the water. This is why news reporters
often say astronauts are weightless when they are in the orbit. But a better way
to describe their condition is to say they are in free fall. Since everything in a
spaceship falls together around the earth, nothing inside supports anything else.
Its true that the astronauts hover and float within their spacecraft as if they were
weightless, but gravity still pulls on their bodies, so they do have weight. The
term weightlessness is a misnomer, but it gets the ideas across. While in free fall,
things seem to have no weight relative to each other.

Provided theres no air resistance, everything near the earths surface falls
with acceleration g. We can use this fact and the formula Fnet = ma to find the
weight of an object. If something is falling freely (in vacuum), its weight is the
only force acting, so its weight is the net force. The acceleration a is simply g, and
substituting in the formula, we find weight = mg (When anything is at rest, the
acceleration is zero, of course, because the force from the ground balances the
weight.) We measure weight in pounds or newtons, the usual units of force. As an
example, well find the weight of 1 kg mass on earth in both newtons and pounds:
weight = mg = (1kg) (9.8m/s2) + 9.8N = 2.2lb.

(Adapted from Physics, an introduction by Jay Bolemon, 1989)