The earth is spinning around the axis which goes through the poles. So what if you had a table cose to the north pole (for example, in Sweden) and a ping pong ball on the table. If the table surface was very smooth and the ping pong ball was very round, would the ball fall off the table due to centrifugal forces of earth spinning? And if it did, it would always fall to the same direction.Of course this doesn't work with a real table because it's not smooth enough. But could this experiment by done by scientists and their magic? By using very precise scientific instruments to create the same result. Because I think it would be cool.
>>17016377to maximize the forces you'd want to place the table at the equator you absolute fucking retard
>>17016378At the equator the ball just becomes lighter but doesn't roll off the table.
>>17016377The experiment you describe doesn't work because of friction but you can do the same conceptual thing with a pendulum. This is one of the easier experiments to show earths rotation. Foucault's pendulum is what you would want to search for this.
>>17016377>>17016437Also if you want to actually do this table experiment you can pretty easily calculate the forces involved even if the experiment itself isn't all that impressive. Centrifugal force points away from the axis so it's directly horizontal at the poles and points directly up at the equator (so no horizontal component) but at the same time the magnitude of the force is 0 at the axis (the pole) and maxed out at the equator. So obviously the maximum horizontal force is somewhere in between. To find your local horizontal force component you just do a sin(x)cos(x) times the maximum centrifugal effect with your latitude in place of X. Turns out this maxes out at 45 degrees from poles at 0.5 times the effect, so 0.5 x 0.034 m/s^2. This is still a measurable acceleration and smooth ball should probably fall off a table but because of the way these things work you would have to construct a "leaning" table. This is because the ground settles to take into account the local centrifugal lean and isn't perfectly aligned with actual gravity but rather aligned with gravity and the centrifugal tilt at any given location. Obviously balls fall off leaning tables so it doesn't really prove anything and isn't very impressive + it's pretty hard to do as far as experiments at home are considered due to the fine tolerances especially near the equator or the poles. That's why I would stick with the pendulum since you can either do that at home or visit many of the public pendulum set ups.
>>17016377You are describing the coriolis effect. Yes, it works. Foucault's pendulum is a famous experiment that demonstrates it in a less retarded way.
