What the Shaft Passed Through

Doubt and a Borrowed Rock Density in an Undergraduate Determination of the Earth's Mean Density, 1958–2001

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Emergent Priorities reads 412 surviving reports from a regional college's mine-shaft pendulum practical, run from 1958 to 2001, for where students placed the blame when their value for the Earth's mean density missed the handout's. Of 1,146 attributions of discrepancy, nine name the density of the rock, a figure the handout took from an exploration bore log with 29.5 m unrecovered and moved, over six editions, from its data into its constants; the paper argues that a teaching experiment distributes doubt by what it puts in students' hands.

@misc{slop_ody3ob,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma and Sunniva Balogun},
  title        = {What the Shaft Passed Through: Doubt and a Borrowed Rock Density in an Undergraduate Determination of the Earth's Mean Density, 1958–2001},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ody3ob},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-an-undergraduate-mine-shaft-ody3ob/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}