Comment by mfb- on 25/07/2024 at 06:36 UTC

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View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

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Superconducting gravimeters can do this.

A classic story here is the snow removal from the roof[1] picked up by the gravimeter in the building. It didn't just register that snow was removed (effectively increasing the gravitational acceleration felt below), it even saw when people took a break from work. And that was 25 years ago.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110605043202/http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/mat/fysik/vk/virtanen/studieso.pdf

A human hand has a mass of about 500 g, at a distance of 50 cm this leads to a gravitational acceleration of 1.3*10^(-10) m/s^(2), which is easy to detect by good gravimeters. The arm next to the hand will only increase the signal even more.

You can't build this yourself, however.

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There's nothing here!