Jade Theater

• Digital Scales
• Baby Scales
• Bathroom Scales
• Counting Scales
• Floor Scales
• Food Scales
• Hanging Scales
• Kitchen Scales
• Medical Scales
• Postal Scales

In most junior high school science class rooms, one of the most common pieces of equipment is the balance scale. Every student learns about mass as opposed to weight through the use of a balance scale. It is also usually associated with learning the metric system as well. Along with the scale itself, comes a set of weights, generally provided in both the English system and the metric system.

Students learn such necessary information as the fact that although an object which weighs sixty kilograms here on Earth will have a weight of just one sixth of what it weighed here if it was placed on the moon, it will still have a mass of sixty kilograms. This lesson is then expanded into a discussion of inertia and Newton’s laws of motion which explain how a person in the deepest reaches of weightless outer space can still be crushed to death by a heavy object even though it weighs nothing at all.

Those very enterprising science teachers will, with the use of a skateboard and fire extinguisher, demonstrate, either in the hallway or in the parking lot, how there is an equal and opposite reaction for every action. One lucky student will get to play the part of an object at rest acted upon by the force of the material in the fire extinguisher being expelled at a high velocity. A variant of this demonstration uses a swivel chair to spin the student with the fire extinguisher rather than sending him or her scooting down the hallway on a skateboard.

All of this is initiated by the introduction of the balance scale. While that introduction might be the cause of some excitement, the magic soon wears off as week after week for the rest of the school year, students must meticulously weigh out the materials to be used in their classroom experiments. The numbers thusly gained are generally to be used in some complicated equations to predict the result of the experiment which then must be compared with the actual results to see if the students can figure out what went wrong with the experiment.

Occasionally, the result will match the prediction, and then the entire class will be summoned to observe the pair of students who successfully followed the directions that were given to all.

Invariably during the course of the school year, one exceptionally curious student will discover that through the clever use of Newton’s laws of motion, an object at rest upon one end of the scale’s balance arm can be sent flying across the room with the proper application of force to the other end of the balance arm. This breakthrough often happens during a class in which something is being dissected. A quick count of the hapless creatures body parts reveals the source of the flying object and the unauthorized experiments on the nature of trajectories is quickly brought to an ignominious conclusion.

At least that’s the way things happened when I went to school. I’m sure that by now the balance scale has been replaced by a modern digital balance scale in most classrooms…