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Reading the books for the first time. How unreasonable is my gripe about thrust "gravity"? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/theexpanse@lemmy.world
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With the show being one of my favorites, I'm happy to say that I'm really enjoying the novels as well. That said, it keeps bugging me when the term "thrust gravity" is always used to describe something that's explicitly Newton's 3rd law - ie, not gravity. I'm probably not understanding something, but it bugs me to see a series that makes a point to be at least reasonably scientific to use a term that seems so wrong.

Side note: How come the third law missed out on natural feeling shorthand? 1st - inertia. 2nd - f=ma. 3rd - ???. Feels like something got overlooked there.

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[–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It's likely for the reader's sake more than anything. A person in The Expanse can experience two types of pulling downward. Actual gravity on a planet/moon, or during a burn. I would agree that they probably wouldn't say "thrust gravity" usually because of context (they know they're on a ship), but technically "gravity" alone would be incorrect, even though in its use it's realized it's referring to the force from the thrust and not a gravity field. A new word might even be created to talk about ship "gravity".

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