Gravity Explained + Why Planets Are Round

Space is big.Time is scary.The universe is beautiful.Transcript and VisualsSupport the Show and Blog

You attract the universe, and the universe attracts you.Everything you see, and everything you don’t, as long as it has a mass, is affected by gravity.Transcript & VisualsSupport the Show and Blog

The terms mass and weight are often used interchangeably in everyday life, but they don’t mean the same thing. Surprise, surprise!What’s the difference? To find out, you only have to look at a bag of Skittles. Let me explain.Transcript and VisualsSupport the Show and Blog

Stuff keeps going until something stops it. That’s the basic idea of Newton’s First Law, right? A ball hitting a wall or something. Yet, we also know that if we push a skateboard down the sidewalk, it’s gonna stop eventually even if it never hits anything. So, why?Friction.For Visuals and the TranscriptSupport the Show

When you lay in bed on your phone, you’re at rest. You aren’t moving. To get nerdy for a moment, you’re in equilibrium. Well, one kind at least.For visuals and the transcriptTo support the show and blog

If you’re here, it’s either because you have been following the series, you need help on homework, or you just like science. Either way, today it’s time to introduce Newton’s Laws.There are 3, but let’s take it one at a time. Sound good? Great!Transcript and VisualsSupport Science People!

As we start to explore the world of physics and motion and look at how things interact more closely, we start to see that nothing happens without affecting or being affected by something else. That idea plays nicely into something called Newton’s 1st Law, but first, let’s talk Net Forces.For visuals and the episode transcriptTo support the showax3Tz1d0aXzvVZT1KBZe

No, not that kind of force. But that would be so cool, wouldn’t it?! We’re talking about the science kind of force.For a bunch of helpful visuals and the transcript to today's episode, follow this linkTo support the show, check out my patreon

Changing speed is different for different things depending on their current speed and size, or their mass. To understand this, we use something called momentum.Have you ever been on a roller coaster? They start of slow. You can move around and lean forward in your seat with almost no energy, but when they start to speed up, like at the first drop, you get pushed into the back of your seat until you’ve stopped speeding up.That change in velocity over time is acceleration. These are our next stops in our series on introductory physics! Check out more here

It's a question you may have never asked, or wondered about, but now I bet you're wondering.As it turns out, it's an unexpectedly loaded question, too!In order to answer, you have to know where the sky is. Where does it start? Where does it end?You might say "that's easy! the sky goes to the edge of the atmosphere, and then it's space?But then you need to know where the atmosphere ends! Is there an edge? At what point does it become space?I'm going to attempt to answer every connected question in this post. Buckle up your brain buckets!Read the transcript for this episode hereSupport my ability to make more episodes, answer more questions, and do more demonstrations at www.patreon.com/sciencepeople