If the earth rotates, why don't tall buildings and earthquakes change its spin?
Cindy asks how, if the earth is rotating and flying through space, the raising of tall buildings and city skylines, plus earthquakes, does not change the earth's rotation.
Answer
Theoretically, any mass raised off the surface produces inertia that would affect a rotating body, so assuming the earth rotates at 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.09 seconds per day, it has a certain angular momentum, centrifugal force, Coriolis force, and Euler force. You would have to put into a computer the height and mass of every building in the world, plus the roughly one million earthquakes a year, the tsunamis, and the volcanoes, and calculate whether all that inertia should change the rotation, not by a micron but by a substantial amount. If it should, then we have more evidence that the earth is not moving but stationary, because we see no such effects. The reason we feel nothing from tall buildings, earthquakes, and tsunamis is that we are not moving, which is exactly the answer we should have given to the Michelson-Morley experiment, where we see no retardation of the light beam because we are not moving through the ether. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever actually done that calculation, so why don't you do it.