this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Would you mind sharing the source of that quote? I’m curious about the ‘relative position […] sums to zero’—relative to what? Suppose the mass is completely contained in the ‘upper right quadrant’ in 3D space (I’m lacking the language skill to express that accurately). Then I can’t find a definition that wouldn’t cause the sum to be positive.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I just grabbed it from Wikipedia, so it's likely written to be understandable to a layman (which is good, because that's what I am).

That said, it's just referring to the mass relative to the point you're declaring the center of mass. If there's 15g on the left, there should be 15g on the right; think of it like the center of mass being (0,0,0) on a 3 dimensional graph. 15g on one side is "negative" and on the other is "positive", so the sum at the (0,0,0) point is 0g.