- #36
paisiello2
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I think it's not whatever works for me but rather whatever works for the physics.
Clearly your table analogy doesn't go far enough.
Clearly your table analogy doesn't go far enough.
paisiello2 said:I think it's not whatever works for me but rather whatever works for the physics.
Clearly your table analogy doesn't go far enough.
Whatever works for you...dauto said:This thread is much ado about nothing, in my opinion. If you don't like the tables, remove them and use the floor instead...
then call it a lack of a force. think of each bit of matter as it spins around the Earth's axis. If there were more force on the matter at the equator, there would be less bulge. If the forces were suddenly zero, the bulge would be infinite, because the matter would just all fly outwards at it's current velocity.paisiello2 said:Even if you pick the "fixed" stars as your inertial frame, you will still measure a bulge in the earth. So where did the force to cause this deformation come from? It can't be a fictitious force because they supposedly do not exist in an inertial frame.
But is this enough by itself to cause the deformation?BruceW said:then call it a lack of a force. think of each bit of matter as it spins around the Earth's axis. If there were more force on the matter at the equator, there would be less bulge. If the forces were suddenly zero, the bulge would be infinite, because the matter would just all fly outwards at it's current velocity.
That was wrong.D H said:From the perspective of a frame that rotates with the Earth, the surface of the Earth is very well approximated as a surface of constant potential energy, where the potential from both the gravitation and centrifugal forces contribute to the total.
From the perspective of an inertial (non-rotating) frame, the surface of the Earth is very well approximated as a surface of constant total energy, where both the gravitation force and kinetic energy contribute to the total.
These two perspectives yield the same result.