Why Don't We Feel the Earth Spinning and Orbiting the Sun?

Right now, you are moving incredibly fast without even trying. If you stand near the equator, the ground under your feet is carrying you eastward at about 1,000 miles per hour (1,600 km/h) as the Earth spins. On top of that, the whole planet is racing around the Sun at roughly 67,000 miles per hour (107,000 km/h). Those are dizzying numbers, yet you feel completely still. So what is going on?

The key is that your body was never built to sense steady speed. Your inner ear and your sense of balance only notice changes in motion, not motion itself. When a car speeds up, brakes, or takes a sharp turn, you feel it, because that is a change. But if the car cruises down a perfectly smooth highway at a steady 60 miles per hour, and you close your eyes, you feel like you are sitting still. The Earth’s motion works the same way: it is steady, so there is nothing for your senses to grab onto.

It helps to picture a smooth airplane flight. A jet cruises at around 500 miles per hour, but once it levels off, you can pour a coffee, walk to the restroom, or fall asleep as if the plane were parked at the gate. The only way to tell you are moving at all is to look out the window at the clouds. The Earth is that airplane, except there is no window showing an outside that stands still, because everything you can see is coming along for the ride.

That last point is the second half of the answer. You are not the only thing moving with the planet. The air, the buildings, the oceans, the clouds, and every person around you are all traveling at the same speed in the same direction. Since nothing near you is being left behind, there is no relative motion to notice. Feeling movement usually means seeing or sensing yourself move past something, and here everything moves together as one giant package.

You might wonder why the spinning doesn’t fling us off, the way you get pushed against the door when a car whips around a corner. Spinning does create a tiny outward tug, but at the equator it comes to only about 0.03 meters per second squared. Compare that to gravity, which pulls you down at about 9.8 meters per second squared, and you can see gravity wins by a landslide, holding you firmly to the ground while that faint outward pull goes completely unnoticed.

The trip around the Sun is even gentler on your senses. Gravity is always pulling the Earth toward the Sun, but the planet is also racing sideways fast enough to keep curving around it instead of falling straight in. That smooth, endless curving produces an even smaller acceleration, around 0.006 meters per second squared. Because the planet has been looping the Sun on almost the exact same path for billions of years, there are no jolts, no sudden turns, and nothing your body could ever register.

So the only thing that could make you feel the Earth’s motion would be a sudden change to it. If the planet abruptly sped up, slowed down, or stopped, you would feel it in a very dramatic way, because you and everything loose around you would keep moving at 1,000 miles per hour even after the ground stopped. Thankfully, the Earth is an extremely reliable spinner, and any change to its speed unfolds far too gradually for anyone to feel.

None of this means the motion is a secret. You see its effects constantly: the Sun rising in the east and setting in the west, day turning into night, and the stars wheeling overhead through the year. We simply read the Earth’s movement in the sky rather than feel it in our bodies, which is exactly what you would expect from a ride this smooth.

References

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