User talk:Billt4

This user may have left Wikipedia. Billt4 has not edited Wikipedia since 6 August 2009. As a result, any requests made here may not receive a response. If you are seeking assistance, you may need to approach someone else.

Normalforcelessness

In free fall, gravity does still act on a falling mass, but it is not balanced by the normal force. No apparent weight is felt because nothing opposes the mass's tendency to fall (put a scale under your feet and it falls with you). The mass accelerates with calculable gravitational acceleration (about 9.8 m/s^2 near the Earth's surface).

Astronauts in orbit are affected by the force of gravity nearly as much as on the Earth's surface: at an elevation of 100 km above the Earth's surface, gravitational acceleration is about 9.4 m/s^2.

However, without the normal force, the astronaut feels "weightless". The word associated with this term does not accurately describe the situation however. What is missing is the "normal force", that which holds him or her against the direction of the gravitational force, which is towards the center of the Earth.

Hence, an appropriate term for this situation is "normalforcelessness". Normal force is the force that is measured by a spring scale and is usually called apparent weight. In normalforcelessness the apparent weight is zero.

Some physicists define weight not as the force of gravity, but as the scale measurement. In this case, normal force and weight are the same. The term normalforcelessness only applies if weight is defined as the force of gravity on an object (which is the prevailing, but not uniform, view).

References

Hewitt, Paul, 2002. Conceptual Physics. Addison-Wesley.
Halliday, Resnick, Walker, 2001. Fundamentals of Physics. Wiley.
Serway, Faughn, 2006. College Physics. Thomson (Brooks-Cole).

Billt4 (talk) 03:08, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

AfD Nomination: Normalforcelessness

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! We welcome and appreciate your contributions, but all Wikipedia articles must meet our criteria for inclusion (see What Wikipedia is not and Deletion policy). Since it does not seem that Normalforcelessness meets these criteria, an editor has started a discussion about whether this article should be kept or deleted.

Your opinion on whether this article meets the inclusion criteria is welcome. Please contribute to the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Normalforcelessness. Don't forget to add four tildes (~~~~) at the end of each of your comments to sign them.

Discussions such as these usually last seven days. In the meantime, you are free to edit the content of the article. Please do not remove the "articles for deletion" template (the box at the top). When the discussion has concluded, a neutral third party will consider all comments and decide whether or not to delete the article. JohnCD (talk) 21:25, 27 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]