🚀 go-pugleaf

Amen Joel!  How confusing this all must appear to our students.  Should
not a metric bath scale display units in Newtons rather than kilograms?
And how about those tables of conversion units that show us that we can
"convert" pounds to kilograms by dividing by 2.2?  Great items for
discussion though.

-Phil Kline
 Mohawk HS
 Sycamore, OH


On Fri, 24 Feb 1995, [Joel Tassie] wrote:

> John said:
>
> >I think I can make a pretty good case that that's
> >exactly what a spring scale does and that, therefore, spring
> >scales measure mass.
>
> I totally disagree here.  Because if you go into outer space, where there is
> no gravitation force, then what does your spring scale read?  Zero.  Does
> that mean that the object doesn't have mass?  No.
>
> A spring scale measures the force of gravity and that will change as the
> gravitational field changes.  You don't get the same value.
>
> Joel Tassie
> Brookland Cayce High School
> Cayce, SC
>