A couple of questions for Bowman, I haven't read all he said carefully, but
here goes a couple of questions.
Can we not stipulate, for purposes of the thought experiment, that planet X
was so constructed out of materials of such rigidity that its shape would be
so close to spherical that plumb bobs would not hand perpendicular to the
normal to the surface of the planet, as Marlow suggested?
Also, I agree fully that if I calculate work for the Coriolis force, that
one gets zero; since as you aptly pointed out its great similarity to the
way magnetic forces work. i.e. magnetic forces do no work! and the Coriolis
will do no work either, pseudo or otherwise.
I agree to that a lot of this is a war of words and symantics. Except and
insofar where the discussion is involved with whether or not the Newtonian
prescription (the three laws as usually state) really form a self-consistent
scheme of analysis. As you are probably aware there has been significant
criticism of the standard formulation of the Newtonian program (and I don't
mean due to the need for GR to accurately describe nature as it seems to be
measured to be.) I really must read Mach's original work. This is the truly
interesting part of the discussion for me and Marlow and I have only danced
around the issues involved here so far.
I plan to submit a posting to the list describing some of the literature on
this and alternative formulations of the laws (resulting in the same
equations), that purport to avoid some of the logical inconsistancies in
standard formulation. I'll probably do that this weekend when I have more
time.
Joel Rauber
rauberj@mg.sdstate.edu