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Re: [Phys-L] treating force as a vector ... consistently



Without wanting to throw fuel on the fire, I should say that engineers distinguish whether or not vectors are associated with a point as a matter of course. If I recall the terminology correctly, one of the principal statics textbooks refers to vectors attached to a particular point as “rooted” vectors.

As an aside, the concept John D was describing (without naming it) was that of a cross section of a fiber bundle. A vector field is a cross section of a manifold’s tangent bundle.

One is free to dismiss it if you like, but when you are doing things like GR it really is a useful idea.

David Craig


<http://web.lemoyne.edu/~craigda>