What would be some fact that, while true, could be told in a context or way that is misinfomating or make the other person draw incorrect conclusions?
What would be some fact that, while true, could be told in a context or way that is misinfomating or make the other person draw incorrect conclusions?
It does, it’s just called a different thing. Centripetal force is exactly the same thing as what most people assume centrifugal force means.
I know I’ve had it explained a million times to me since I was a kid but… I still can’t remember the difference between the two. I do, however, remember this little factoid about it.
I think centripetal force is whatever is pushing/pulling the object toward the center of rotation, such as the closed door of a car pushing on you while driving around a curve, where otherwise you would fly out of the car. Another example is the wheels of the car causing it to travel on a curve instead of straight. Or the rope of a tetherball for a pulling example.
In most cases (besides orbits in space) the force is question is actually the electromagnetic force, like any other case where objects made of atoms touch.
Personally I think it’s weird to call that a specific force, especially by those who don’t want to give centrifugal force a name - sure it’s really just things “tending” to travel straight instead of following the curve, but no reason that can’t have a special name, it’s certainly intuitive enough.
Ahem AKSHULLY
The centripetal force is the one that is directed directly towards the center (hence its name) of the virtual circle your object is rotating about (the blue arrow in this diagram). It is the “physical” force that acts on the object to make it follow a circular path, except it isn’t because that force doesn’t exist either, it’s just a convenient model for billions of billions (of…) of fundamental particles interacting together in probabilistic ways that, statistically, makes the thingamabob go round the imaginary point.
The centrifugal force is, as Black Hat eloquently puts it, the force that appears when you use the rotating object as the frame of reference (which is like saying that the entire world revolves around the object). This isn’t any more or less “correct” than using the ground as the frame of reference (in fact the ground itself is an accelerating frame of reference, which is why the Coriolis effect is a thing, it just is almost never significant except in weather-related applications and using the ground as a frame of reference is usually more useful than a “more stable” frame of reference like the solar system, or the milky way, or whatever, because honestly calculating train arrival times relative to saggitarius A* means that all trains are going about 225000 m/s which is just a pain in the ass to deal with let’s be real).
If you’re trying to build, say, “gravitational rings” for a sci-fi space station, then talking about the “centrifugal force” (which is proportional to the velocity arrow in the previous diagram) is a whole lot more relevant to the people you’re providing fake gravity to than saying “well akshully the force that you feel keeping your feet on the ground of the station doesn’t exist, you just exist in an accelerating frame of reference”.