The Flat Earth Society
Other Discussion Boards => Science & Alternative Science => Topic started by: AstralSentient on October 14, 2017, 04:37:04 AM
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Was having a discussion and thought this would be interesting to think about. I'll start it off with a thought experiment:
Let's suppose that you are in a room, maybe a circular room. That circular room is on a shaft that starts turning. The room starts rotating.
You got two observers, observer A in the rotating room, and observer B outside observing it. Observer A experiences centrifugal force, they experience a tendency to be forced to the wall. Now, the room is closed, no windows or doors, so they don't exactly know whether it's rotating or not by appearance, but surely they know it is rotating because they experience a centrifugal force. Or do they? Observer A starts wondering whether it is really true that the centrifugal force they seem to be experiencing implies they are objectively rotating independent of the universe outside. Maybe the centrifugal force that they are experiencing is from relative acceleration and therefore it could be equally true that the universe itself is rotating rather than you, giving the centrifugal force. The reasoning here isn't inaccurate in Relativity as applied to inertial frames since motion is indeed relative between reference frames. However, this is an accelerating frame (since it is changing velocity by rotating), not an inertial one, so the question becomes, does relative motion apply to accelerating frames as well?
Now, this is where observer B comes in. Observer B is not accelerating and so observer A's conclusion that the universe may just as well be rotating instead would be flawed. If the universe is indeed rotating to give the centrifugal force, then observer B would be experiencing centrifugal force as well.
This may seem to end it, showing that Accelerating frames have absolute motion rather than relative, but could it be that the accelerating reference frame of observer A could transfer coordinates of a rotating universe to this reference frame and therefore allow a rotating universe exclusively to this frame?
It may sound like observer A might as well be in a rotating room rather than a rotating universe anyways, but if they can be equivalent, then possibly the inertial forces present are determined by the relative accelerations between a reference frame and the universe.
Anyways, something to think about, I would like to hear thoughts on this and whether the concept of relative motion could be applied to accelerating frames or not.
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This is all very well understood.
Check out "Newton's Bucket": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_argument
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This is all very well understood.
Check out "Newton's Bucket": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_argument
Sure, that argument represents the notion that since the accelerations may be experienced by one observer and not the other and so is absolute, but it doesn't exactly specifically address the 'exclusive to my reference frame' addition of transferring coordinates to your reference frame, which is what I was wondering about.