Gsquare: Thanks for your kind comments. My primary concern is to sell more of my books. There is no secret about the principles I intend to establish. A quick look there will show you that I’m proposing more than absolute rotation. Of course I am also interested in promulgating some of the ideas in the books.

My original purpose in this thread is not as peripheral as it may seem. I am concerned about some ideas that undergraduate physics students may uncritically accept from their teachers and textbooks. Some of those ideas can lead to closed-mindedness not only to new ideas of others, but to new ideas they themselves might otherwise have. To that end I will separately post FORCES SOME PHYSICISTS FORGET. Though not a physicist, I am guilty of the same sin, as you know. Nonetheless, I will cast a stone.

In JOURNEY I point out that no relative motion of an observer can alter the evidence of the spin of electrons, the oblateness of rotating self-gravitating spheroids, the rotations of the Sun’s photosphere and chromosphere, the simultaneous orbits of the solar system, the spectral line widening of stars, the measured rotation of the local galaxy, and the obviously rotational shapes of many galaxies. Hey! We’re back into astronomy and against the mainstream at the same time!

Unfortunately, you are starting off wrong. The "centrifugal force" on an electron is insignificant in this situation.

It is the wavelength of the electron's wave function (according to Quantum Mechanics) which forbids it from existing outside a few discrete energy levels (orbitals).

You make an elegant argument, but ultimately, it is based on Bad Science(tm) and incorrect facts.

Richard, I admit I have been having trouble with trying to figure out why inertial forces are considered fictional when they cannot be totally discounted. I have been rethinking a lot of what i know about physics, until i figured out one thing, inertial forces cannot cause an increase in momentum. That is what so special about it. That fact makes it fictional, even though may be present and measurable.

Forces always works in pairs, and, centrifugal is the companion to centripedal, but that does not make it real.


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The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine.
J. B. S. Haldane

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: moving_target on 2002-08-10 00:57 ]</font>

I've come to the conclusion that about half the people posting on these boards have some grasp of conceptual physics and virtually no understanding of the quantitative part of physics. It takes many years of intense study and agony to even get a foothold or a whiff of understanding on the basic laws of physics.

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Marcus Asaro

"I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, save me Superman!" - Homer Simpson.

moving_target: According to relativists, the inertia of a body results from its interaction with the gravitational force of everything else in the universe. I disagree with that source for inertia. Nevertheless, only by virtue of its own gravitational force can a body interact with the gravitational forces of other bodies. Inertial force, then, would be a gravitational force and very real.

You are right that inertial forces cannot cause an increase in momentum. If they did, nature would embody a self-contradiction, which it never does. Let alone not causing momentum changes, inertial forces act to impede any such changes. Not to be a self-contradiction is not so special, and certainly not a reason for being labeled a fiction.

My dictionary defines fiction as something feigned, invented, or imagined. It defines real as actual rather than imaginary, ideal, or fictitious. If something is present and measurable it is not imaginary; it is not fictional; it is real.

Fictitious forces are imaginary forces. Imaginary forces exist only in the mind, not in the reality external to the imagining mind. Fictitious forces cannot interact with real bodies or other forces. No imagining mind is required to produce and maintain the inertial forces active in an inertial guidance system.

Now we're getting somewhere!
Yes, most relativists are Machian, a point I also find most distasteful and, since it is an implied and unproven basis of GR, can be urged as a valid arguement against it.
So where is your source for inertia??

So you are anti - Machian, but still retain equivilence principle. OK. So where is the origin of inertia in your perspective? Gravity?

G^2

of cource by that definition, all physics is fiction, since it was all invented to describe the physical world.

which illustrated the fact that, in physics, some definitions are slightly different then what is in literature. inertia is an exibit of the conservation of momentum, while inertial forces are caused by the transfer of momentum.

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The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine.
J. B. S. Haldane

Mach's hypothesis is just that, a hypothesis. It has not been proved or even tested. It is, at best, a conjecture that may or may not provide a tentative first step in the direction of find ing the root cause of mass. For now, the "cause" of mass is still very much unknown.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson