Would a balloon filled with vacuum instead of helium float?
If you have read the article How Helium Balloons Work , then you know that a liter of air at sea level weighs about 1.25 grams. A liter is 1,000 cubic centimeters, or about 61 cubic inches — the size of a 1-liter soda bottle. A liter of helium, on the other hand, weighs about 0.18 grams. If you weigh a 1-liter bottle filled with air and then weigh the same bottle filled with helium, it will weigh about 1.07 grams less. If the bottle itself weighed less than a gram, you couldn’t weigh it at all — it would float! You could turn the scale upside down and put it above the floating bottle to check its negative weight! Generally, a balloon has to be several liters in size before the 1-gram-per-liter weight difference of helium vs. air is enough to overcome the weight of the balloon itself and float. If you could somehow fill a 1-liter bottle with a vacuum, it would float even better. A perfect vacuum weighs zero grams, so a liter of perfect vacuum weighs 0.18 grams less than a liter of hel
