Comment on When you inhale helium from a balloon, do you weigh less?

pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

That’s a fun question, and kind of depends on how you see it. If you’re going by “standing on and reading a scale in Earth’s atmosphere”, I believe the scale would read ever so slightly less. However, this is kind of mixing up weight and how we measure weight. Helium still has mass, it’s not negative mass, it still is affected by gravity and gets pulled down by it like everything else. It’s just that it’s less dense than other gasses in the atmosphere, and so the buoyancy overpowers gravity and it floats. So, you with deflated lungs actually weigh less than you with lungs inflated with helium, even if that’s not what the scale reads!

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