When you're on a carnival ride, you feel it – you've been pulled out, and all you can do is hold on. Our planet spins much faster than that, so why shouldn't we all hold on for dear life? Why don't we feel the Earth's rotation?
There are two main reasons. The first is that the Earth's rotation is smooth.
“If you are in a car and traveling at a constant speed on the highway, and if you close your eyes and ignore the road noise, you will feel steady,” he said. Stephanie Debbiean astronomer and content strategist at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
If that car hits the brakes frequently, it will know you're moving. But because it stays at a constant speed, you feel immobile.
Related: Can you see the Earth's rotation?
In other words, “We know that there is no such thing as absolute motion. The only thing that matters is relative motion,” he said Greg Jabbourprofessor of physics and optical sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
“People like Newton and Galileo have pointed this out,” he said. “Galileo famously imagined a thought experiment of being in the bowels of a ship. If the ship was sailing in calm waters versus a ship anchored in port, you wouldn't notice any difference according to the laws of physics.”
Just as if we were in a car or on a ship, everything on Earth moves with us as well. If you roll down a car window on the highway, you will see a face full of wind as the car hits you with millions of air molecules. But inside the car with the window open, the air moves with you and you don't feel the wind.
Likewise, our planet's atmosphere moves at the same speed as we do, so it is constant for all of us.
The other reason we do not feel the Earth's rotation is… gravity. “The force of gravity that holds us to the ground is much, much stronger than the force that would cause us to fly outward,” Dib said.
It's called the feeling of being drawn to the outside of a carnival ride, or a donut car Gravitational acceleration. “It's a feeling of inertia,” Jabour said. “Your body wants to keep going in a straight line, but if you're in your car, the car is trying to pull you into a circle.”
The Earth's rotation pulls everything outward in the same way, but the force that keeps everything attached to the Earth overcomes this pull.
“The acceleration of gravity is about 9.8 m/s^2 on the surface of the Earth, and this decreases due to the Earth’s rotation at the equator, where things move at their maximum speed, about 0.03 m/s^2,” Jabour said, “which is measurable, but very small in comparison.” “We feel the same gravity, so we don't notice it.”
