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what "obstructed gravitation" is

October 10, 2007 by jarnold, 2 years 7 weeks ago
Comment: 25381

Anonymous,

You wrote that I “remain mystified and make incomprehensible statements like: ‘confusion of obstructed gravitation with the inertial obstruction’"

Thank you for kindly pointing out that I should have said “…with the inertial acceleration.”

“And nonsense like: "a body moving freely in a gravitational field is always moving uniformly from its own frame of reference" -- by definition, a body is at rest in its own frame of reference, though it may be subject to a balanced set of forces, such as gravity and the normal force from a surface on which it sits.”

Actually, a body that is undergoing an inertial acceleration is not at rest in its own frame of reference. Considering a body in a lab on the earth’s surface to be at rest is a practical convenience, as per Dicke’s “weak principle of equivalence.” Otherwise, when you step on the gas at a green light, the rest of the universe could just as well be said to be accelerating in the opposite direction.

But you seem to be someone interested and able to bring clarity to the world, and to shame nonsense into enlightenment or silence. So maybe you can explain how gravitation, which you will presumably agree is a geometric distortion of spacetime, and which is force-free from the reference frame of a body moving unobstructed (or "moving freely", or "at rest" in space, or falling in an elevator), suddenly becomes a force from that same reference frame when it intersects with the surface of a massive body - if meeting the inertial resistance of the surface is not an "obstructed gravitation", if the resulting surface acceleration is not the sole instance of force. I’d be very grateful for your assistance.

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