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Re: Apparent weight



What is the reaction force to the centrifugal force and what body does it
act upon? Just curious.

There is none. Newton's third law of motion does not apply in a
noninertial frame of reference. Momentum is not conserved within
such a frame, either.

Leigh

Howdy,

Hmmm... Since you can't tell if you're in an accelerated frame of reference
of in a local inertial frame with a gravitational field Newton's Third Law
should never apply and Momentum should never be conserved (except by
accident of course). I really believe that working with "inertial forces"
with introductory students leads to more problems than it solves. I prefer
to introduce "inertial forces" when needing to transfer to an accelerated
frame of reference to obtain "pure rotational motion" so I can use
tau=I*alpha which only holds under that condition and the equivalence
principle later in the course as something that Einstein formalized.

As a separate issue, I can only derive the relation tau-net-on=dL/dt (all
vectors of course) for macroscopic objects from the similar equation for
individual particles by assuming that the internal forces that hold bodies
together are central forces. Does that mean that objects that are held
together by magnetic forces (is this even possible?) must radiate angular
momentum (true, too in the form of E&M waves) and that's built into
Classical Mechanics?

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs@interaccess.com)