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Re: Newton's 3rd law? was Re: inertial forces (definition)



At 7:40 PM -0700 10/20/99, Leigh Palmer wrote:

the force that acts on a body in an
Earth based lab, that I have been calling "weight", doesn't have a
third law partner. The gravitational force the body exerts on the
Earth isn't quite the same magnitude and it doesn't act in exactly in
the opposite direction. Why tell your students it does?

so we shouldn't be using an analogy between the 'force' 'caused' by a
gravitational field acting on a mass and the electrostatic force on a
charge Q in an electric field E?

does this 'force' have the same pedagogical problem in your view?

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