I thought about it for a moment, and almost settled on B—after all, there isn’t much gravity on the moon, and a pen is so light that it might just be unaffected. I
Many people (probably more people) make the same mistake when asked ‘which falls faster, the 1 kg weight or the 20 kg weight?’. I guess this illustrates why compartmentalization is useful. False beliefs that don’t matter in one field can kill you in another.
The example you use is in my opinion not a failure of compartmentalization but of communication.
Humans will without fail, due to possesing sufficiently opitmised time saving heuristics, always assume when talking to a nonthreatening, nondescript and polite stranger like youself that you are a regular person (the kind they normally interact with) talking about a situation that fits their usual frame of reference
(taking place on a planteary surface, reasonable temperature range, normal g, one atm of preasure, oxygen present enabling combustion ect.) except when you explicitly state otherwise.
Taking two weights of different mass (all else being equal) and dropping them will not result in “neither falling faster”. To realize why consider the equation for terminal velocity [which is not considering bouyancy, Vt=squr(2gm/densityprojected area of objectdrag coefficent)].
They of course won’t think about it this way, and even if they did they would note that on a “normal” distance before hitting the ground would result in t1 and t2 being about the same if not really equal.
The rather cringe worthy approximation comes when they unintentionally assume a slopiness of communication on your part (we leave out all except the most important factor when asking short questions) and that you really meant a few other things except mass are not equal (since the average things that they handle that have radically different masses from each other are rarley if ever identical in shape or volume).
The reason it is cringe worthy is not that its a bad assumption to make in their social circle. But that their soical circle is such that they don’t have enough interactions like this to categorize the question under “sciencey stuff” in their head!
PS I just realized you may have mistyped and meant the old “What is heavier 10 kg of straw or 10 kg of iron?” which ilustrates the point you try to make a bit better (I actually got the wrong answer when saying my mind out right away at the tender age of 7, I realized my error a second to late to avoid the laughing of my schoolmate). But even this is either a faliure of communication or just ignorance of the concept of density.
PS I just realized you may have mistyped and meant the old “What is heavier 10 kg of straw or 10 kg of iron?” which ilustrates the point you try to make a bit better
No. I meant what I wrote. The thing with the straw and or feathers is just word play, a communication problem. I am talking about an actual misunderstanding of the nature of physics.
I have seen people (science teacher types) ask the question by holding out a rock and a scrunched up piece of paper and asking which will hit the ground first when dropped. There is no sophistry—the universe doesn’t do ‘trick questions’. Buoyancy, friction and drag are all obviously dwarfed here by experimental error. People get the answer wrong. They expect to see the rock hit the ground noticeably earlier. Even more significantly, they are surprised when they both fall about the same speed. In fact, sometimes they go as far as to accuse the demonstrator of playing some sort of trick and insist on performing the experiment themselves.
The same kind of intuitive (mis)understanding of gravity would lead people to also guess wrong about things like what would happen on the moon.
Even better is the question “what weighs more, a pound of feathers, or a pound of gold?”
Gur zrgny vf yvtugre—vg’f zrnfherq va gebl cbhaqf, juvpu unir gjryir bhaprf gb gur cbhaq engure guna fvkgrra, naq n gebl bhapr vf nccebkvzngryl gur fnzr na nibveqhcbvf bhapr.
Edit: I just realized a bit of bias on my part. I probably wouldn’t have commented if you had used SI unit for mass [kg] even though that is just as often used in non-scientific context to mean “what the scale shows” as pounds.
I completley misread what you actually wrote and just took the “what weighs more, a pound of feathers, or a pound of gold” of the previous commenter into account.
You explicitly refer to mass, so sorry if you read the unedited comment.
We have an ambiguity between whether the weight-measure refers to mass or to what the scales show. For two objects (gold and feathers) it is stated that one of these properties is the same, and the question is about the other property. From the context, we can’t obviously disambiguate one way or the other. In such situations, assumptions are usually made to make the problem statement meaningful.
Many people (probably more people) make the same mistake when asked ‘which falls faster, the 1 kg weight or the 20 kg weight?’. I guess this illustrates why compartmentalization is useful. False beliefs that don’t matter in one field can kill you in another.
The example you use is in my opinion not a failure of compartmentalization but of communication.
Humans will without fail, due to possesing sufficiently opitmised time saving heuristics, always assume when talking to a nonthreatening, nondescript and polite stranger like youself that you are a regular person (the kind they normally interact with) talking about a situation that fits their usual frame of reference (taking place on a planteary surface, reasonable temperature range, normal g, one atm of preasure, oxygen present enabling combustion ect.) except when you explicitly state otherwise.
Taking two weights of different mass (all else being equal) and dropping them will not result in “neither falling faster”. To realize why consider the equation for terminal velocity
[which is not considering bouyancy, Vt=squr(2gm/densityprojected area of objectdrag coefficent)].
They of course won’t think about it this way, and even if they did they would note that on a “normal” distance before hitting the ground would result in t1 and t2 being about the same if not really equal.
The rather cringe worthy approximation comes when they unintentionally assume a slopiness of communication on your part (we leave out all except the most important factor when asking short questions) and that you really meant a few other things except mass are not equal (since the average things that they handle that have radically different masses from each other are rarley if ever identical in shape or volume).
The reason it is cringe worthy is not that its a bad assumption to make in their social circle. But that their soical circle is such that they don’t have enough interactions like this to categorize the question under “sciencey stuff” in their head!
PS I just realized you may have mistyped and meant the old “What is heavier 10 kg of straw or 10 kg of iron?” which ilustrates the point you try to make a bit better (I actually got the wrong answer when saying my mind out right away at the tender age of 7, I realized my error a second to late to avoid the laughing of my schoolmate). But even this is either a faliure of communication or just ignorance of the concept of density.
No. I meant what I wrote. The thing with the straw and or feathers is just word play, a communication problem. I am talking about an actual misunderstanding of the nature of physics.
I have seen people (science teacher types) ask the question by holding out a rock and a scrunched up piece of paper and asking which will hit the ground first when dropped. There is no sophistry—the universe doesn’t do ‘trick questions’. Buoyancy, friction and drag are all obviously dwarfed here by experimental error. People get the answer wrong. They expect to see the rock hit the ground noticeably earlier. Even more significantly, they are surprised when they both fall about the same speed. In fact, sometimes they go as far as to accuse the demonstrator of playing some sort of trick and insist on performing the experiment themselves.
The same kind of intuitive (mis)understanding of gravity would lead people to also guess wrong about things like what would happen on the moon.
Even better is the question “what weighs more, a pound of feathers, or a pound of gold?”
Gur zrgny vf yvtugre—vg’f zrnfherq va gebl cbhaqf, juvpu unir gjryir bhaprf gb gur cbhaq engure guna fvkgrra, naq n gebl bhapr vf nccebkvzngryl gur fnzr na nibveqhcbvf bhapr.
Feathers have lower density, so the same mass occupies greater volume, experiences greater buoyancy and weighs less.
Edit: I just realized a bit of bias on my part. I probably wouldn’t have commented if you had used SI unit for mass [kg] even though that is just as often used in non-scientific context to mean “what the scale shows” as pounds.
I completley misread what you actually wrote and just took the “what weighs more, a pound of feathers, or a pound of gold” of the previous commenter into account.
You explicitly refer to mass, so sorry if you read the unedited comment.
We have an ambiguity between whether the weight-measure refers to mass or to what the scales show. For two objects (gold and feathers) it is stated that one of these properties is the same, and the question is about the other property. From the context, we can’t obviously disambiguate one way or the other. In such situations, assumptions are usually made to make the problem statement meaningful.