To be fair, the “my stomach feels that I’m falling” proof is no proof at all. Could be your stomach is merely no longer feeling the effect of being pushed up.
Exactly correct. Being pushed by something as it accelerates feels exactly the same as being pulled into it by gravity.
My gripe is with the claim that when you step off a chair you 'become inert', presumably meaning 'cease accelerating'. As soon as you say that, you prejudge the issue. Going on to say that you then 'see the earth rise up' is circular logic.
I
think, based on the usage of the word 'inert', that Tom believes the sensation you have when you step off something is uniquely correlated with straight-line travel with no forces applied. But it isn't. Our sensation of weight or weightlessness is not - cannot be - engendered by forces that act on our whole body equally. We could endure - would not even
notice if our eyes were shut - an acceleration of 10G, or 100G, or 1000G applied equally to every particle of our bodies. Their relative positions and the forces between them would remain unchanged; we would feel nothing. What we feel as weight is the
uneven application of force requiring the internal structures of our bodies to take the strain and redress the balance. We would most certainly, if briefly, feel a 1000G acceleration if the soles of our feet were prevented from undergoing it by the ground.