Hey Bill Nye, 'What If the Earth Were a Cube Instead of a Ball?' #TuesdaysWithBill | Big Think

'What If the Earth Were a Cube Instead of a Ball?' #TuesdaysWithBill

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Understanding the shape of the Earth is all about its mass, says Bill Nye the Science Guy. If it weren't for all the water, rocks, metals, and lava on our planet, it might have an irregular form.

As Earth rotates around the sun, its irregularities are smoothed out by the larger body's gravity. The same is true for all the planets, though Pluto has just enough mass to be spherical — despite famously no longer being classified a planet.

Asteroids are an example of bodies without enough mass to have their shape affected by the sun's gravity. They are made of many elements found on Earth, but not in enough quantities to be rounded by gravitational forces.

For those interested, Bill Nye describes an experiment with marbles and rubber bands that simulates how gravity affects massive bodies. And for some reading material, check out Nye's book, Unstoppable:Harnessing Science to Change the World.

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BILL NYE, THE SCIENCE GUY:

Bill Nye, scientist, engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, is a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been doing most of his life. In Seattle Nye began to combine his love of science with his flair for comedy, when he won the Steve Martin look-alike contest and developed dual careers as an engineer by day and a stand-up comic by night. Nye then quit his day engineering day job and made the transition to a night job as a comedy writer and performer on Seattle's home-grown ensemble comedy show “Almost Live." This is where “Bill Nye the Science Guy®" was born. The show appeared before Saturday Night Live and later on Comedy Central, originating at KING-TV, Seattle's NBC affiliate. While working on the Science Guy show, Nye won seven national Emmy Awards for writing, performing, and producing. The show won 18 Emmys in five years. In between creating the shows, he wrote five children's books about science, including his latest title, “Bill Nye's Great Big Book of Tiny Germs." Nye is the host of three currently-running television series. “The 100 Greatest Discoveries" airs on the Science Channel. “The Eyes of Nye" airs on PBS stations across the country. Bill's latest project is hosting a show on Planet Green called “Stuff Happens." It's about environmentally responsible choices that consumers can make as they go about their day and their shopping. Also, you'll see Nye in his good-natured rivalry with his neighbor Ed Begley. They compete to see who can save the most energy and produce the smallest carbon footprint. Nye has 4,000 watts of solar power and a solar-boosted hot water system. There's also the low water use garden and underground watering system. It's fun for him; he's an engineer with an energy conservation hobby. Nye is currently the Executive Director of The Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest organization.

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Hayes: Hello. My name is Hayes. Bill Nye, I want to ask you a question. What would happen if the earth was a cube or if it wasn't but, what would happen if it was? Would the gravity be weird or the same? Thank you for answering my question.

Bill Nye: That is a great question and I can give you a real science answer. The earth is not a cube because it has enough stuff. It has enough rocks and metals and water and lava and everything that all pull on each other equally. And every time you do that you get a ball. You get a sphere. In other words, if you made a cubicle earth and it was orbiting the sun and so on, after a few years, pick a number, a few million years, it would squish itself into a ball. And so when we study asteroids we go out there with spacecraft and look at asteroids, Dawn, Vesta, Hayabusa 2, we observe asteroids that are not cubes but are very rough. They're regular shapes. They're not balls. They don't have enough stuff to become balls or spheres. But you are alive when the first pictures from Pluto came back to earth and Pluto is apparently right there having just enough stuff to make it into a ball. It's cool. So it's because everything is pushing or pulling in the same direction all the time on everything else it resolves itself or it ends up as a ball.

Try this, get some marbles and a big rubber band and put the marbles on a tabletop, put the marbles in t .....

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