Loading...The Earth is spinning. We all know that. But what affects on our daily lives does that really have? Although we don’t feel the Earth spinning beneath our feet, we do directly encounter the consequences of its rotation occasionally. One occasion is when we travel by airplane, as we are always trying to spend as little time as possible in the air. So the fact that, seemingly contrary to logic, planes fly faster to the east than they do to the west, is actually quite troubling to frequent flyers. And that doesn’t really make sense, as the Earth spins 1000 mph to the west. So isn’t the Earth spinning towards the plane, making the journey shorter than if you were to fly the same direction as the spinning?
That seems logical, but as you’ll learn in today’s featured video by Minute Physics, that logic is wrong. I won’t give away all the details, as Henry from Minute Physics explains it the best, but it has to do with the fact that not only the Earth is spinning but all the air around the Earth as well.