9 Science Facts To Make You Sound Clever At Parties
3. "People In Space Aren’t Floating, They’re Falling"
It is during your conversations about black holes that you can easily segue into this next soundbite.
People in orbit around the earth, like the astronauts aboard the ISS, aren't beyond the reaches of gravity and that's not the reason why they can float around the station.
In the word of Buzz Lightyear, they're simply "falling with style".
A more accurate way to explain it would be that the astronauts and the space station et al are actually constantly falling towards the earth and missing it. This is because the ship is travelling past the earth as quickly as it is falling towards it and so it simply falls around the edge and remains in orbit.
It will stay this way so long as its momentum remains constant and this is true for anything that orbits anything else.
The passengers aboard the ISS are apparently weightless because they are in constant freefall, in the same way that if you were in a lift and the cable snapped (yeah yeah, and the breaks failed) you would feel as though you were "floating" inside the lift as you fell to your death.
In fact, there's nowhere in the universe you can go to escape the influence of gravity. The distortions in spacetime caused by a massive object extend across the universe, getting gradually weaker but still there. Right at this moment, you are being affected by the gravity of the earth, the moon and even the far distant Andromeda galaxy.
Of course, you're also pulling them slightly closer to you with your very own gravitaional field (and your sheer animal magnetism, no doubt).