Robert Couri, age 8, of Peoria, Illinois, for his question:

Why don't we feel the earth going around?

Our old earth is spinning around like a top. At the equator the ground spins around at more than 1,000 miles per hour. The earth also orbits the sun    at more than 1,000 miles a minute. It's natural to wonder why we don't feel all this speedy traveling. After all, sometimes we feel the speed when we ride in a car. Ah, but the key word here is Sometimes. When a car is riding along at a steady pace, we don't feel the speed at all, except in regard to the landscape speeding by us.

When riding in a car, we do notice when it speeds up and when it slows down. It so happens that the earth spins steadily day and night, Sundays and weekdays. Also, it never stops going around the sun. This is why we don't notice its speed. But if it kept slowing down and speeding up, we certainly would notice the changes.