You Need to Weigh Some Water. All You’ve Got Is a Paper Clip
MacGyver’s swiss army knife was always the paperclip. Wired has a fun project building a scale with some simple household objects.
Now for the scale. This might seem simple, but there’s going to be some graphing involved such that this might be more appropriate as a blog post instead of a video. Let’s do it.
Remember, the goal here is to measure the mass of some water. Since we are on the surface of the Earth, there is a constant relationship between mass and weight—so we are technically going to measure the water’s weight. What’s the difference between mass and weight? Here is my full explanation, but the short answer is that mass is the amount of matter (protons, neutrons, electrons) a thing is made of and weight is the gravitational force exerted on that object by the Earth.
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