3 ms·

> the Earth weighs approximately six ronnagrams This is from a Physics forum? Really? No! The Earth does not have weight! It has mass. Weight is a force.

> the Earth weighs approximately six ronnagrams This is from a Physics forum? Really? No! The Earth does not have weight! It has mass. Weight is a force. It is a function of gravitational pull between two masses. If you want to talk about force you have to use Newtown's Law of Universal Gravitation: F = (G * m1 * m2) / r**2 You could speak in terms of gravitational pull between the earth and the moon or any other object in space, and that's about it. I can't see how the concept of weight makes any sense when it comes to a planet. At all. Think of a hypothetical object in the middle of space with nothing whatsoever around it for millions of light years. No weight. Mass, of course. You can't just use earth's 9.8 m/s*2 to convert from Kg to Newtons...that makes no sense at all in the frame of reference of any planet, even earth. This isn't pedantic at all. Try to take a physic test anywhere and confuse these concepts, units of mass and force and see how well you do.

adrian_b 4y ago
It is very important to distinguish the 2 physical quantities whose standard names are now "force" and "mass", but it is debatable whether it was good choice to arbitrarily assign to the word "weight" the meaning of a force and to establish the new word "mass" (new with this meaning) for what is now called "mass". The word "weight" and its equivalents in other European languages, e.g. "poids", "pondo" etc., have been used for thousands of years principally to name the quantities measured by weighing with a balance, which are masses, not forces, and only seldom and mostly metaphorically and non-quantitatively to refer to a force. By etymology, such words derive in one way or another from the operation of using a weighing balance, e.g. "pound" means "hanging", from hanging objects on the weighing scales. The word "mass" has been used for thousands of years only with a meaning that had nothing to do with a measurable quantity, but only to name some amorphous piece of some material, such as dough, clay, soil, rubble. A wiser choice would have been to name as "weight" what is now named "mass" and to use a name such as "force of gravity" for what is now named "weight". Such a terminology would have kept the continuity with the traditional meanings of the words and would not have offered opportunities for the majority of the people, who even today continue to use those traditional meanings in colloquial language, to be corrected by those who have made an arbitrary choice to assign new meanings to old words. Unfortunately there exists a very large number of scientific or technical terms whose meaning has been changed some time during the last few centuries, sometimes intentionally, due to questionable decisions, but in many times due to various errors or misunderstandings. Even when such names reflect very serious errors of those who have coined them, their meaning can no longer be changed, as too much new literature has accumulated, which uses the new meanings.

adrian_b 4y ago

It is very important to distinguish the 2 physical quantities whose standard names are now "force" and "mass", but it is debatable whether it was good choice to arbitrarily assign to the word "weight" the meaning of a force and to establish the new word "mass" (new with this meaning) for what is now called "mass". The word "weight" and its equivalents in other European languages, e.g. "poids", "pondo" etc., have been used for thousands of years principally to name the quantities measured by weighing with a balance, which are masses, not forces, and only seldom and mostly metaphorically and non-quantitatively to refer to a force. By etymology, such words derive in one way or another from the operation of using a weighing balance, e.g. "pound" means "hanging", from hanging objects on the weighing scales. The word "mass" has been used for thousands of years only with a meaning that had nothing to do with a measurable quantity, but only to name some amorphous piece of some material, such as dough, clay, soil, rubble. A wiser choice would have been to name as "weight" what is now named "mass" and to use a name such as "force of gravity" for what is now named "weight". Such a terminology would have kept the continuity with the traditional meanings of the words and would not have offered opportunities for the majority of the people, who even today continue to use those traditional meanings in colloquial language, to be corrected by those who have made an arbitrary choice to assign new meanings to old words. Unfortunately there exists a very large number of scientific or technical terms whose meaning has been changed some time during the last few centuries, sometimes intentionally, due to questionable decisions, but in many times due to various errors or misunderstandings. Even when such names reflect very serious errors of those who have coined them, their meaning can no longer be changed, as too much new literature has accumulated, which uses the new meanings.