Why can't we feel the Earth spinning?

Two main reasons explain it. Earth's rotation is smooth and steady, and humans sense changes in motion rather than constant motion. Also, gravity holds us to the ground far more strongly than the spin tries to fling us outward. Physicists and science educators quoted in the sources agree on both points. [1] [2]

Stephanie Deppe, an astronomer, describes a car at constant speed on a highway: with your eyes closed and the road noise tuned out, you would feel stationary. Braking or swerving is what makes motion noticeable. Greg Gbur, a physics professor, adds that only relative motion matters, an idea tied to Galileo and Newton. Galileo imagined being below deck on a ship, where calm sailing and being docked feel the same. The atmosphere also moves with the planet, so relative to us the air is still. [1]

A UC Santa Barbara science answer makes the same point: you feel changes in the rate of your motion, not the motion itself. A car on a freeway feels much like one crawling along a driveway, and a passenger cannot judge an airplane's speed by feel. [3]

The surface at the equator moves at roughly 1,600 to 1,675 kilometers per hour, about 1,000 miles per hour, and the speed falls to zero at the poles. Rotation does create an outward tendency, like the pull on a carnival ride, but it is small. Gbur gives gravity's acceleration as about 9.8 meters per second squared, with rotation reducing it by about 0.03 at the equator, which is measurable but tiny by comparison. [1] [2] [4]

One source says the outward effect is only 0.3 percent of gravity's pull, so without rotation you would weigh 0.3 percent more. Cool Cosmos likewise says a scale would show a reduction of a fraction of a percent at the equator compared with the poles. [4] [2]

The sources give different ratios for how much stronger gravity is than the spin effect: about 300 times in the UCSB answer, about 1,000 times in BBC Science Focus, and roughly 300 times by the 0.03 versus 9.8 figures. These differences are probably due to rounding and to where on Earth is measured, since the effect is largest at the equator. All agree that gravity dominates by a wide margin. [3] [5] [1]

Earth's orbit around the Sun, at about 67,000 miles per hour, goes unnoticed for similar reasons. Cool Cosmos says Earth is in free fall in its orbit, with no sudden changes in acceleration, and gives the orbital acceleration as about 0.006 meters per second squared. [2]