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

For accelerating reference frames, you need to move past newtons laws and use general relativity. In that framework, an experimenter enclosed in a box cannot distinguish between acceleration and gravity except in detecting very minute lack of parralelism due to the radial direction of gravity.

https://www.einstein-online.info/en/spotlight/equivalence_principle/

I personally would not get hung up on that term.

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  • [–] [S] -3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Sure, it feels similar, but it still doesn't seem appropriate to conflate the two. If someone said airplanes use "anti gravity" to fly, that'd blatantly incorrect, no? It doesn't help that the series focuses on actual gravity and it's consequences constantly, which just shines a spotlight in this particular incongruence (for me, at least).

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Not just feels similar; any experiment conducted would yield identical results assuming the source of thrust is perfectly constant without variations.

    But rather than continuing to discuss the ways in which you dislike "thrust gravity," is there a term you would find preferable instead?

    Moderately misleading terms is pretty common in real science and technology though. For example, particle spin has nothing to do with actual rotation and instead just has properties that is similar to objects with rotation. So getting obsessively hung up on semantics would be a very frustrating activity even in actual scientific literature.

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  • [+] [S] -7 points 2 months ago*

    This is the second time you've suggested I'm mentally unwell for having a minor gripe. The rest of your comment is on topic, but I'm not continuing to engage in that sort of discussion. If you don't want to have a conversation about the topic at hand, feel free to stop commenting. If you do, stop being so insulting.

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