I've read that centripetal force is "pushing inward" which sounds like utter baloney to me. When anything is spinning, nothing is pushing inward. It's going around in a circle with every atom attempting to fly outward. If the spinning thing is hollow and there are loose objects inside it, such as people, those objects are being forced outward by the centrifugal force while the material composing the outer parts and the inner surface resists that outward force - as long as structural integrity doesn't fail.
If a spinning object's integrity fails, the broken bits fly off at tangent vectors which can be calculated based on rotational speed, angular velocity, and mass of the fragments. Force requires motion, or the energy expended *attempting* to produce motion. In a rotating object there's no force *attempting to push or pull inward*, it's resistance to outward motion - until the object is of sufficient mass that gravity is strong enough to bother with. Get up to planet size and centrifugal force and gravity get to have a spinning tug of war that slightly flattens planets that rotate fast enough. Earth's mass and rotation speed make the diameter at the equator enough larger than the distance through the axis that Mt. Everest is only the 10th highest point from Earth's center, with the peak of Mt. Chimborazo 1.3 miles higher than the peak of Mt. Everest. On Wednesday, June 26, 2019, 12:33:04 AM MDT, Erik Christiansen <[email protected]> wrote: I wasn't exposed to such overzealous physics lecturers, although colleagues back in the '80s had been. My reaction to them describing centrifugal force as a "fictitious force" was to reason that it is a resultant force, equal and opposite to the centripetal force which is continually accelerating the mass, just as gravity does with astronomical bodies. But that's just my reaction to what I heard. _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
