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Article: LETTERS.
- Article from:
- The Engineer
- Article date:
- September 7, 2001
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Centaur Communications Limited. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Great balloon debate remains aloft
Our brainteaser of 29 June, which posed the problem of a hot air balloon in a sealed container on a pair of scales, and asked what would happen to the scales when the balloon took off, proved controversial. This week, the poser of the original question responds.
In response to Mike Draper's observation (Letters, 31 August) on the balloon brain teaser: in Mr Draper's analogy, jumping on the scales is a dynamic problem involving forced acceleration.
From force mass x acceleration, an increase in the force is present on the scales at both take off and landing, and as such will obviously affect the readout on the ...