Post created by: Amanda
In one of the last scenes of the movie Peter Pan, Tinkerbell sprinkles pixie dust onto the pirate ship, turning it into solid gold and enabling it to fly. The density of air is 0.001225 g/cm^3 (Air Density Calculator), so in order for anything to float in the air it has to be less dense than air. For example, Helium’s density is 0.0001785 g/cm^3 (Density of Helium in 285 Units and Reference Information), this is a much lower density than air, which is why a balloon full of Helium floats. However, the average density of wood is below a little 1 g/cm^3, and is much less than the density of gold, which is 19.32 g/cm^3, which means that neither of these would be able to float in the air. On top of that, since gold is so much more dense than wood, when the ship turned to gold it weight almost twenty times more than it did originally. According to the article The Way Of The Pirates, the average wooden pirate ship weighs around 1,000 tons, which means that a pirate ship made of gold would weigh about 20,000 tons. If physics were applying to this scenario, neither a wooden ship nor a gold ship would be able to float, since they both weigh too much to fly.
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