page_title: Mass versus weight
section_title: Buoyancy and weight
hierarchical_section_title: Mass versus weight / Buoyancy and weight
caption_attribution_description: This is a cropped version of the original with some lightness, contrast, and color adjustments
context_page_description: In common usage, the mass of an object is often referred to as its weight, though these are in fact different concepts and quantities. In scientific contexts, mass is the amount of "matter" in an object, whereas weight is the force exerted on an object by gravity. In other words, an object with a mass of 1.0 kilogram weighs approximately 9.81 newtons on the surface of the Earth, which is its mass multiplied by the gravitational field strength. The object's weight is less on Mars, where gravity is weaker, and more on Saturn, and very small in space when far from any significant source of gravity, but it always has the same mass.
  Objects on the surface of the Earth have weight, although sometimes the weight is difficult to measure. An example is a small object floating in water, which does not appear to have weight since it is buoyed by the water; but it is found to have its usual weight when it is added to water in a container which is entirely supported by and weighed on a scale. Thus, the "weightless object" floating in water actually transfers its weight to the bottom of the container.
context_section_description: Usually, the relationship between mass and weight on Earth is highly proportional; objects that are a hundred times more massive than a one-liter bottle of soda almost always weigh a hundred times more—approximately 1,000 newtons, which is the weight one would expect on Earth from an object with a mass slightly greater than 100 kilograms. Yet, this is not always the case and there are familiar objects that violate this mass / weight proportionality.
  A common helium-filled toy balloon is something familiar to many. When such a balloon is fully filled with helium, it has buoyancy—a force that opposes gravity. When a toy balloon becomes partially deflated, it often becomes neutrally buoyant and can float about the house a meter or two off the floor. In such a state, there are moments when the balloon is neither rising nor falling and—in the sense that a scale placed under it has no force applied to it—is, in a sense perfectly weightless (actually as noted below, weight has merely been redistributed along the Earth's surface so it cannot be measured). Though the rubber comprising the balloon has a mass of only a few grams, which might be almost unnoticeable, the rubber still retains all its mass when inflated.
  Again, unlike the effect that low-gravity environments have on weight, buoyancy does not make a portion of an object's weight vanish; the missing weight is instead being borne by the ground, which leaves less force (weight) being applied to any scale theoretically placed underneath the object in question (though one may perhaps have some trouble with the practical aspects of accurately weighing something individually in that condition). If one were however to weigh a small wading pool that someone then entered and began floating in, they would find that the full weight of the person was being borne by the pool and, ultimately, the scale underneath the pool. Whereas a buoyant object (on a properly working scale for weighing buoyant objects) would weigh less, the object/fluid system becomes heavier by the value of object's full mass once the object is added. Since air is a fluid, this principle applies to object/air systems as well; large volumes of air—and ultimately the ground—supports the weight a body loses through mid-air buoyancy.
  The effects of buoyancy do not just affect balloons; both liquids and gases are fluids in the physical sciences, and when all macro‑size objects larger than dust particles are immersed in fluids on Earth, they have some degree of buoyancy. In the case of either a swimmer floating in a pool or a balloon floating in air, buoyancy can fully counter the gravitational weight of the object being weighed, for a weighing device in the pool. However, as noted, an object supported by a fluid is fundamentally no different from an object supported by a sling or cable—the weight has merely been transferred to another location, not made to disappear.
  The mass of "weightless" (neutrally buoyant) balloons can be better appreciated with much larger hot air balloons. Although no effort is required to counter their weight when they are hovering over the ground (when they can often be within one hundred newtons of zero weight), the inertia associated with their appreciable mass of several hundred kilograms or more can knock fully grown men off their feet when the balloon's basket is moving horizontally over the ground.
  Buoyancy and the resultant reduction in the downward force of objects being weighed underlies Archimedes' principle, which states that the buoyancy force is equal to the weight of the fluid that the object displaces. If this fluid is air, the force may be small.
caption: A hot air balloon when it has neutral buoyancy has no weight for the men to support but still retains great inertia due to its mass.
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