Question: How big is the earth

Zoltan Lipp answered on 13 Mar 2023: last edited 13 Mar 2023 9:51 am

This question triggers some thoughts, that could be useful for future scientists 🙂 … first of all, my immediate answer would be: “google it!”, that relates to the fact that there are vast amount of knowledge and there is no way one can know everything by heart and you don’t need to, because fortunately nowadays its much easier to find these information compared to my university days when there were no internet… That said, it is also important to note, that there are LOT of stuff on the internet, and what you need to learn as a future scientist (or as a future anything for that matter…) is how to navigate across the information, how to find efficiently what you are looking for, develop critical thinking to distinguish the real science from “fake” science… for this kind of questions you are asking a good technique could be approximation… so let me bounce back this question to you: if you have no internet how would you try to approximate the mass of the Earth to make sure Lucien up there is telling the truth? 🙂 (I can help in a comment if you start …)