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Home Q & A Board Science-Related Homework Help Physics Astronomy
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fireman5 fireman5
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11 years ago
I am working on a project, i need to find different ways people in the 17th and 18th centuries computed the mass of the earth, They gave us Kepler and Newton. What other ways were there?
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JujujugoJujujugo
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11 years ago
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11 years ago
I dont think that any of the more modern ways of computing mass of the earth (through astronomy and attraction of other masses in space, high speed photography of objects falling in a vacuume) etc really could be accurately applied in the 17th 18th century.

To do so would require much more accurate time keeping and photography in conjunction with the theoretical ideas of Newton as to the way gravity works.

A rough approximation could be made by simply finding the volume of the earth (since they knew it was roughly a sphere, and they knew the diameter to within a few %). Then all one has to do is approximate the mass of an average piece of the earth by weighing rocks of known volume.

I would suspect that they did not know the density of the center of the earth as accurately as we do today but they could easily be in the correct ballpark +/- 50% with this approach.

As for better estimates the formulas involved a gravitational constant, and while newton may have determined such a constant existed his guess was probably a bit off formulas the accuracy of the "constant" of gravity which is needed to find the weight of the earth would be missing I doubt that they could do much better. Cavendish found out the weight of the earth by measuring the gravitiational constant in the end of your time range (1798). Once the gravitationl constant could be determined accurately, and distances known then the formulas could be applied.
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