"Roger Long" wrote in message
...
Several months ago, I made this statement during a discussion of
stability here. The minor flame war that resulted made it impractical
to defend the proposition and it wasn't much fun anyway.

While I was away, I had occasion to put together a web site section on
the subject of stability and made the subject line the title of the
first chapter. If anyone is interested in the technical aspects of
what floats their boat with a minimum of math, click:

http://www.rogerlongboats.com/Stability.htm

My son's former physics teacher reviewed the buoyancy section and
pronounced it "Beautifully explained" so it's had some minimum of
vetting aside from being basically a written version of a guest
lecture I used to present to college students.

The last chapter is a brief introduction to the endless foolishness in
the Coast Guard stability regulations for sailboats. This recently
got me an email from a retired inspector saying basically, "Thank
goodness someone finally said something!"

Enjoy




Way too simplistic, I'm afraid. You seem to attribute buoyancy to gravity
alone. WRONG!

Let's create a system that has 1/100 Earth gravity. Let's place a 1/100
Earth gravity sphere half full of water and half full of air in outer space.
Let's pressurize this sphere to one atmosphere. Let's float a boat in the
water. The boat that weighs a ton only weighs 1/100 ton in this sphere but
the atmospheric pressure is Earth normal. Therefore the pressure upwards on
the boat's hull would be the same as on earth (due to atmospheric pressure)
according to your ill-conceived theory. The boat that is already floating
100 times higher than on earth due to its being 1/100 the weight (mass)
would be pushed even higher. If your theory were correct this would not be
the case.

I rest my case.

Wilbur Hubbard