16 February

More ways we maybe don’t understand gravity and weight well. The SAXA salt container was empty, and I asked a few family members to lift the spoon and the salt container a few times each, and say which one felt ‘heavier’. Everybody including me thought the spoon was heavier. When we put them on the scales, the salt container was more than twice the weight of the spoon. We then tried it with an empty cardboard box, about half the size of a shoe box. It felt about the same weight as the spoon. It was nearly 10 times the weight of the spoon, on the scales. Try it, it’s quite surprising for people. What we feel as ‘weight’ when lifting isn’t the weight of the object we’re lifting.