How do scientists know what's inside the Earth?
Textbooks show a diagram of the Earth with a crust, mantle, and core, and they say the core is molten iron. But the deepest hole ever drilled barely scratches the surface. How could anyone possibly know what's thousands of miles down? How do they figure out what the inside of the Earth is made of?
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There's a great explanation of this on the HowStuffWorks website, and the NASA site has good material too if it's space-related. Both are written for normal people, not scientists, so you won't get lost in jargon.
4 Answers
There's a great explanation of this on the HowStuffWorks website, and the NASA site has good material too if it's space-related. Both are written for normal people, not scientists, so you won't get lost in jargon.
I'd recommend the book 'A Brief History of Time' by Stephen Hawking, or for the math side, 'The Joy of x.' Your library has them. They're written for curious regular people. You don't need a degree to understand the big ideas.
The math looks scary but it's mostly just a precise way of saying something you can understand in plain English. Once you get the concept, the equations are just bookkeeping. Focus on the idea first, the symbols second.
I'm a physics grad student and this is one of my favorite questions to explain. The key insight is that our everyday intuition doesn't always apply at extreme scales — very small (quantum), very large (cosmological), or very fast (relativistic).
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