Myths and Misconceptions: Equinox Eggs?

Is it true that you can balance an egg on its wide end on the equinox? Yes!

But probably not for the reason you’ve heard. It all comes down to gravity, one of the fundamental phenomena of nature. As we experience it every day, we’re used to feeling a pull toward the ground. This is because mass always has gravity, the larger the mass, the stronger the effective pull. The effect is small, but when you add up all 6,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 kgs of mass in the Earth, the gravity is quite noticeable to us. Most importantly, gravity always acts towards the center of that mass, which is why we feel it pulling us straight down to the surface no matter where you are on the surface.

What about the Moon’s gravity, shouldn’t that have an effect? It turns out that yes, it does indeed. Gravity’s effect is proportional to distance, the further away, the less the effect, but interestingly enough it never actually goes to zero, even though it’s immeasurably tiny. Molecules of gas floating in interstellar space in galaxies hundreds of millions of light years are technically pulling on you with their gravity, though the effect is far too small to detect.

So back to the equinox egg-balancing phenomenon. According to some variations, there’s some sort of ideal alignment of the Moon and planets or even the Sun that make this feat possible. And while it’s still technically true that the planets, Sun and Moon all have a gravitational effect, their combined gravitational influence is so small relative to the Earth’s gravitational pull that it’s entirely irrelevant.

Balancing an egg is simply a matter of patience and concentration, as its surface is full of tiny bumps and imperfections, but it can be done successfully on any day of the year!

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