Talk:89: Gravitational Mass

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 04:45, 29 January 2014 by Jolbucley (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search

Can anyone add more information about the information stated in the first panel? It is the most intriguing part. --NeatNit (talk) 16:21, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

There are two ways to look at mass; through gravity and through inertia. When you look at it through gravity then mass is basically how much a body is affected by gravity, or how much gravity it has. When you look at it through inertia then mass is how much a body resists changes velocity, ie. how hard it is to make a body (like a car) accelerate/decelerate. It turns out that looking at it boths ways gives the same result (same mass). --BorisIvanBabic (talk) 10:04, 27 September 2013 (UTC)
In other words, apparently, inertial and gravitational mass for a given body are always identical, or rather reflect the same underlying characteristic of the body which we measure as mass, for any object in the universe; although certain theories explain why this might be the case, none adequately explain why it must be. ---Jolbucley (talk) 04:45, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Considering that the comic says that there doesn't seem to be a reason for it to be true, and the title text, I think that the missing part of the joke possibly had something to do with her being "heavier" than what a scale would show (since the scale would use the square law to get the mass from the force), and possibly that she is immovable (or hard to move) --BorisIvanBabic (talk) 10:04, 27 September 2013 (UTC)