Spining

[Robbii6]

Hello,

A funny thought just went through my head. You know how if your in a train and you jump you wont move.<-- if you get what i mean. Well lets say you in a space craft with lots of room orbiting earth. You go to the centre of mass moving yourself away from everything so you are 'floating' <-- scientific i know! But you are 'floating' at the COM. What would happen if the craft was given some thrust to set it in a spin? Would you spin with the craft or would you watch the craft spin around you? If it spun around you that would be quite a weird experience and wpuld probably be very confusing for you mind and would make you feel quite sick. Right?

[Tex_NL]

As long as you don't touch anything it should spin around you. But as the craft spins the air inside will too. So eventually, it might take quite some time, you would start to spin with it due to drag.

Take an old fashioned record player, put a bucket of water on it and float a cork in the water. If you now switch on the record player the bucket starts to rotate but the cork does not. After not to long the water starts spinning with the bucket and takes the cork with it.

Edited August 21, 2013 by Tex_NL

[lajoswinkler]

Tex_NL is right. And if your ship is at vacuum, you'd just stay where you were because nothing is giving you the rotational momentum.

For similar reasons, you could orbit Earth and if it changed its rotational speed, it would not affect your orbital period.

[magnemoe]

Reminds me of this idea.

I guess you would get lighter and ligher as you get faster but you would still have air resistance from your ground speed.

At some point you would feel like an rover on Gilly with the added downside you would have an headwind, most probably effect would be that you would stumble.

And yes check out http://freefall.purrsia.com/ if you don't know it.

[Apature rocket science]

Hoc gaming did a massive thing about artificial gravity, he manged to created it, but the probblem with it is for example you kick a ball ford it will do a loop de loop and land back down

[K^2]

Reminds me of this idea.

That is a pretty gross lack of understanding of physics. Inertia doesn't resist motion; only changes in motion. And the only acceleration that should result in is centripetal. There is absolutely nothing to effect change in angular velocity.

[magnemoe]

That is a pretty gross lack of understanding of physics. Inertia doesn't resist motion; only changes in motion. And the only acceleration that should result in is centripetal. There is absolutely nothing to effect change in angular velocity.

Think you are right, I always assumed he was skating against the rotation until he reached the speed of the floor and felt no artificial gravity, so I did not realize the mistake in it.

And no that would not work in practice at least not with roller blades because you would get air resistance while getting to low artificial gravity to accelerate.

Strange as the comic tend to get its physic right including orbital operations.