Hi,
why do you feel the push in carousel? Or when you are in car turning and you feel pushed on some person which can feel pretty awkward. This is all because of centrifugal force right?
YOU have been living in a lie
Your whole life was lie if you ever thought that there is something like centrifugal force.
So where is the problem? What causes us to fly from circle? There are three forces acting on you on carousel, gravity of Earth, the bench up so you do not fall through it and also towards the middle so you do not fly away. But still you feel the push from the circle, why if there is no force?
Your body wants to stay in the movement (it has some inertia) which is straight in direction and also in speed. This is Newton’s first law. But it does not because the bench goes in circle and you hold it so you go in circle too but your body does not want to do it so it would rather fly away in straight line which would be tangent to the movement.
Above you can see that the line TP is what your movement would actually look like relative to the circle which is the carousel.
At every point of the movement you want to go tangent to the circle but you are holded by the force which has the tag of centripetal force. This is just a tag, all kinds of forces can be centripetal, gravity for orbits, friction of wheels for car in turn, ball on string or the bench of the carousel on which you are sitting.
Lesson: do not use the word centrifugal force anymore, it is not there and laws of physics would not work if it would be there.
Check out the video below showing when the speed gets way too big and the centripetal force simply is not able to hold it together anymore (here the centripetal force are the bonds holding the CD together):
Dragallur
Thanks my physics teacher!
Good post. I always used to confuse those two terms….and really need to work on my phrasing and purge centrifugal out of my vocabulary, lol. And I guess on a smaller scale, hammer, discus, and shotput throwers in track and field and the Olympics spin and when they release the protective, it flies straight. Cool video too
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Thank your! I really enjoyed the video too!
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I’d like to click ‘like’ more than once on this post! The myth of centrifugal force needs exploding like that CD. A lot and often! As you say, there is NO centrifugal force. There is only conservation of momentum (centripetal!). I still recall the day in high school where my physics teacher demonstrated the point by suspending a ping-pong ball in a jam jar, filling the jar with oil, and pirouetting with it. This was hilarious as the guy was about 6’4″ and rode a Norton Commando to school – making the demo utterly memorable. I remembered that just last year when I wrote a hard sci-fi novella involving a spaceship with a rotating carousel. I did the math and everything to work out the centripetal forces at various distances from the hub. It’s had reviews since it was published from people who thought the story had too much science and they couldn’t understand that part, but I don’t care. I like science.
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Thank you! I love science too. Such a thing as too much science, that does not even exist 😀 .. It sounds like an idea of artificial gravity in spaceship.
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It was – I wrote the story set on the spaceship and had some fun with the different ‘artificial gravity’ on each deck of a two-deck carousel. The plot included the results of the coriolis effect.
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Cool
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