What Makes a Ship Float?
What makes a balloon fly? What makes a Blimp fly? Certainly the Earths crust keeps you from falling to the Earths center. That is an easy answer and is straightforward and is fortunate for us. A properly designed ship floats (does not sink) because the weight of the volume of water it displaces is equal to the weight of the ship. If you add more weight to the ship, it rides lower in the water and vice versa. This was figured out by Archimedes. Our friend Archimedes also has the answer to the balloon flying. In this case the medium is air rather than water, but the principle is the same. A balloon will rise until weight of the volume of air it displaces is equal to the weight of the balloon. Of course if you blow it up with Helium rather than a breath of your air, it will rise higher and faster because Helium weighs less than air. As for a Blimp, which is a non-ridged airship, there are inflatable bags inside called Ballonets. These bags can be filled more, which increases the volume or
According to Newton’s law of gravity, every object exerts a pull on the things around it. Since the earth is millions of times bigger than the things around it, it pulls everything toward itself. If this were not so, everything on earth, including people, would go floating off into space. Why then, when a ship is on the water, d
