It seems to me the discussion on apparent weight ultimately talks to the
futility of what Ludwik started out to do. Clearly we all have our pet
peeves, our built in prejudices, have developed our own ways of
explaining/developing certain topics. While Leigh and others are happy with
an operational definition of weight others are not. {Of course Leigh wants
to analyze everything from within accelerating frames of reference ;-( }
The point is, that whether you operationally define weight as what a
bathroom scale measures or as the net force towards the center of a nearby
large gravitational body, or just as THE force of that large gravitational
body, there are subtleties that you will have to deal with. The choice
seems to be much more a question of personal taste and the degree to which
one has developed a consistent set of instructional tools that address the
choice. To this end, it is very hard to say that any of the popular text
books are _wrong_, only that they might not conform to one's personal
choice. I haven't examined the whole list carefully, but I suspect that
many of the entries probably fall into this category.
BTW: I'm back to being totally confused by the airfoil thing--I thought the
movement was that Bernoulli had NOTHING to do with the lift, now what I'm
seeing is that if one means by Bernoulli a pressure difference between top
and bottom due to different speeds of the air--then that's OK, but the
reason for the different speeds is not the continuity equation as generally
presented in the Bernoulli explanations. Is that it?
P.S. Leigh, good decision not to write that book (interesting though it
might be) since I can't see my students (or Ludwik's from his
characterizations) making better headway from such an approach. ;-)