alt Hacker NewsThere’s a bit of math you can do where you calculate the gravitational effect of standing on a sphere. You can redistribute the mass within the sphere and it won’t affect the gravitational pull, assuming it’s radially symmetrical.
One of those unintuitive results.
It probably only works in classical gravity but it’s still neat.
Replies
Agentlien • 06/17/2025
That actually sounds really intuitive to me. If you start with a uniform mass and then redistribute mass symmetrically it makes sense that the change in the two sides would cancel out.
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The bit of math is the Shell Theorem <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem>.