“Today, scientists have at their disposal machines so precise they can detect the weight of a single bacterium and so sensitive that readings can be disturbed by someone yawning seventy five feet away, but they have not significantly improved on Cavendish’s measurements of 1797. The current best estimate for Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion metric tons, a difference of only about 1 percent from Cavendish’s finding. Interestingly, all of this merely confirmed estimates made by Newton 110 years before Cavendish without any experimental evidence at all.”
I chose this quote because it shows how painfully accurate Cavendish’s measurements were, despite them being of such an extraordinarily small level. It’s astonishing how he could measure the Earth’s weight without even exiting his own home. Also, if Cavendish had not discovered the Earth’s weight this way, we would not have gained this information for centuries to follow; we’d need to have developed technology that’s more complex than that was available at the time.
This discovery went hand in hand with other important discoveries -- such as the distance between planets, Earth’s distance from sun, and Earth’s shape and dimensions -- that were made in the late 18th century. Without this information, trips to the moon, rover deployment, and other landmark projects would not be possible. Cavendish laid the foundation of years of future projects to come.
My question is: what discoveries were made as a direct result of the Cavendish’s work. Also, what other information has been gathered from using the knowledge of the Earth’s weight? The Earth’s weight is an important number, but I can not think of any ways it could be used to learn other information, that wasn’t already known in the late 18th century.
I chose this quote because it shows how painfully accurate Cavendish’s measurements were, despite them being of such an extraordinarily small level. It’s astonishing how he could measure the Earth’s weight without even exiting his own home. Also, if Cavendish had not discovered the Earth’s weight this way, we would not have gained this information for centuries to follow; we’d need to have developed technology that’s more complex than that was available at the time.
This discovery went hand in hand with other important discoveries -- such as the distance between planets, Earth’s distance from sun, and Earth’s shape and dimensions -- that were made in the late 18th century. Without this information, trips to the moon, rover deployment, and other landmark projects would not be possible. Cavendish laid the foundation of years of future projects to come.
My question is: what discoveries were made as a direct result of the Cavendish’s work. Also, what other information has been gathered from using the knowledge of the Earth’s weight? The Earth’s weight is an important number, but I can not think of any ways it could be used to learn other information, that wasn’t already known in the late 18th century.