Upside down in New Zealand

[LeedsRhinos]

Having recenty moved from England to New Zealand my 6 year old daughter pointed to NZ on a globe & asked if we lived there why weren't we upside down. I couldn't really answer properly. So why AREN'T we upside down?

[zgma]

The globe is just a representation of what the planet is like, and it's fairly arbitrary which side is thought of as "up" and which is "down". I believe the Northern Hemisphere is visualized as up because the mapmakers whose vision won out were from the Northern Hemisphere. Gravity draws us in towards the Earth, so wherever we are on the planet, our personal perception of the direction of "down" is towards the Earth. We also have our own normalized perceptions based on our experience. We experience the majority of our lives right side up (not walking on our hands upside down) so our brain is used to knowing that the ground is down and the sky is up. There have been studies on people who have for some reason had to be upside down for a while. So their senses were taking in a different picture. Suddenly the ground was where they thought of in their vision as up, and the sky was down. But after a bit their brain normalized their experience, so that way of experiencing the world didn't make them feel upside down.

[New Forester]

You can see how our perception of "down" can easily be changed by watching carefully when affected by "centrifugal" forces. This is particularly noticeable on trains, where the ride is quite smooth and the turns are gradual. If you look at the scenery on the inside of a curve, it'll appear to slant uphill. If there is level water in the scene this can be rather alarming, because it looks as if a lake or river is about to rush down into the train. Likewise the scenery on the outside of the curve will slant downwards. You get a similar effect in aeroplanes, but in cars bumps and twists tend to confuse things. If recent films are anything to go by, NZ is composed entirely of mountains, so all this may be tricky for you...

[seb brown]

The earth is round and pulls everything in towards the middle. Your perception of being upside down or not, is relative to the horizon that you are looking at. So if you were able to look at the whole globe, and you had one person standing in UK, and one standing in NZ, they would be standing opposite to each other (eg one's head pointing up, the other's down). So the person in NZ would be upside down, relative to the person in the UK. That's right.... isn't it?

[bernardo]

You ARE upside-down, but the ground on which you are standing is ALSO upside-down, so the two cancel each other out.