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acceleration of gravity



While we are on the subject of "pet peeves"

I object to the notation of "weight" and "apparant weight."

I like to define weight as the reading one gets when standing on a spring
scale. Your weight is then mg only when the acceleration of gravity at your
location is "g" and you are not accelerating. Among other things, this leads
to a nice development of the concept of "weightlessness." It's not that the
forces go to zero, etc.

Now I realize I am opening the door for criticism for my usage of "g" being
called the acceleration of gravity, but so be it.

I think sometimes we are more concerned with the absolute "correctness" of
all of our statements than we are of the abiltiy of our students to
understand what we mean. Sometimes simplicity and appealing to students
previous experience and knowledge leads to a better understanding of concepts
than can be achieved by being "absolutely correct."

Obviously, we never want to do something that is obviously incorrect.

Many of our theories at the engineering physics level need further refinement
as more complete pictures of all of the pertinent variable come into play.
To re-label "g" after gravitational fields etc. are discusses is no problem
for me.