Re: little gee

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 11:21 AM 9/12/01 -0400, Stefan Jeglinski wrote:
> the way I was taught: "its units are m/s^2 and it is the acceleration of
> gravity" was a common shortcut description, although we always "knew"
> that this was fraught with difficulties.

We did?
I wasn't taught that way.
I never knew of any difficulties whatsoever.
I still don't know of any.

> N/kg is much more expressive of g's concept and mathematical origin.

I would say just the opposite!
  -- In particular, what does N/kg predict for a massless particle?
  -- I didn't know g had a mathematical origin.
     I thought it originated in physics.
  -- I have a very clear concept of the physical origin of g.
     I have not seen any reason not to express this as an acceleration.

Little g is directly observable.  We observe the acceleration.

Little g is a field.  It assigns an acceleration to every point in the
chosen reference frame.  The field near the earth's surface has been
observed with accuracy on the order of 1 microgal (one part in a
billion).  Here are some of the results:
  http://cires.colorado.edu/~bilham/Absgdata.html

These observations were !not! made by measuring a force and dividing by a
mass.  They were made by directly observing the acceleration.
  http://cires.colorado.edu/~bilham/FG5operation.html