If a person lifts a weight and holds it above his/her head, the person can be said to be pushing that weight, right?
Yes, they are pushing it up.
Buy if you look at it you can say that the person is merely resisting that weight after pushing that weight up.
No. You might say they are holding it up, or stopping it falling, but not that they are merely resisting it.
They are holding it up.
Do you agree that the person is pushing up on the weight?
That is the key issue here. Are they pushing up or not?
No trying to reword it to avoid a push up from below.
If someone tried to push down on that weight you would have to resist that push, right?
By pushing up with even greater force, this requires a feedback mechanism.
By resisting that push you can stop the person pushing down that weight if you are strong enough to resist. Fair enough?
Now transfer that analogy to the stack.
How? Air doesn't function that way.
How does the air below magically push up more rather than merely getting pushed out of the way?
It will only push up if you push into it and displacing that stack which raises that stack up the sides
i.e. the paper should fall and the membrane example I provided earlier should have the membrane remain flat and a helium filled balloon will fall.
just like you would see water raise up the sides of a boat and friction grip it or crush it or resist that boats push into it.
It would be more akin to what happens if you drop an object into water. The water will resist the motion, and provide a force to push upwards, based upon pressure.
However, if you were to hold a glass with a card over the water in it whilst only having a tiny bit of atmosphere inside it, it's going to rest on the stack wherever your hand holds it.
This analogy is useless as it already does that in the air. No water below is needed here.
Your problem is your reliance on the word " vacuum"....you actually believe it exists on Earth regardless of so called space.
Because they do. Your problem is your hatred of the word because it means space is real.
A vacuum does not need to be a perfect vacuum in order to be a vacuum.
The whole reason it works is because of the small amount of atmosphere in that tube that gets compressed by the atmospheric pressure on the mercury dish. This compresses the trapped atmosphere inside the tube above the mercury.
Again, if this was the case it would work in any orientation, with the portion of the tube filled being based upon the pressure. It does not. Instead it is the height that remains constant.
You can't even use fictional gravity for this because it would make no sense at all because the mercury is in the dish so it cannot be pulled down.
The mercury is in the dish and the tube. Why can't it be pulled down by gravity?
Sure, gravity can't pull it all the way down and through the dish, but it can establish a pressure gradient across it, which is the fundamental principle of operation.
The same mechanism that water does.
Water pushes objects up based upon the pressure gradient in it. If air does the same, everything would be pushed upwards.
It's a resistance
Resistance cannot generate relative motion. If it is resistance, it will simply be slowed.
or a crush.
A crush is inwards, not upwards.
It is a very simple question:
Does the atmosphere push up?
If yes, what determines the magnitude of this push up?
While we are at it, what determines the magnitude of the push down?
And again, if you think we need to go back to the basics, then stick to the basics, explain why the atmosphere stacks.