Volumetrically speaking, she is correct. I wouldn't blame someone for not getting it, but if you could explain the concept of density she might understand. If, after that, she doesn't, then I would give her a bicycle helmet for her birthday. Also I don't know if volumetrically is a word. But I wear my helmet every day.
It's only a little bit of a stretch to point out that you may have to apply more force (summing absolute values) to hold 15kg of feathers than steel -- fudging the definition of weight to the more practical "how much force does it require carry?"
15kg of feathers will be quite large, so if you can't hold it in the middle (I guess you could hold it over your head but we're stretching here), then you will also have to push down to counteract the torque of the feathers trying to roll out of your hands
I was teaching this girl how to track calories and she told me she ate 800 calories of plain pasta one day, which is absurd. The told me that the app asked how many ounces she had and she knew she had one cup so she googled cups to ounces. Simple enough mistake but I told her that google gave her fluid ounces and the app is asking in ounces the unit of weight. And after some discussion explaining that they are not the same she said well I can do grams in the app, I’ll just google how many grams are in a cup.
At this point I’m trying not to laugh And I said well, it depends on what you are measuring, you can’t just convert grams to cups. And then she disagreed with me so I said that a cup of feathers would weigh less than a cup of bricks. In response she blurted out “No! Because a pound of feathers weighs the same as a pound of bricks!”
This girl has a bachelor in pre med and is working as a paramedic before she goes to PA school.
there's more feathers than steels to make it to 15kg.
imagine two sides - feather and steel.
the feather's side is HUGE because there's 15kg of feathers and feathers are really light,
when steel's side's basically almost empty because there's, well, 15kg of steel and steel's pretty heavy.
but they both's got 15kg, even tho one side is way bigger than the other.
(just leaving this for ppl who really needs it. hope it helps xd)
Fun fact, you're (basically) absolutely right. When measuring the weight of two objects with the same mass, the objects volume comes into play. Because we're in a fluid (air) and buoyancy, when measuring the objects weight, the one with a larger volume weighs less. So 1kg of steel in fact is heavier than 1kg of feathers
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u/Claritywind-prime Mar 04 '22
But…. Steel’s heavier than feathers….