Why don't I loose gravity when I step off the surface of a rotating cylinder?

Suppose you were located in space on the axis of the hollow cylinder. You decide to move to the inside surface of this cylinder by navigating towards it in a direction determined by the location of the external fixed stars which you can see through the windows of the cylinder. Suppose you decide to move in your inertial reference frame towards the star Sirius. You are completely weightless during this 'radial' trip to the surface, but as you get nearer to the surface you see that it the surface just below your feet is moving transverse to your path at 3 miles per hour. Well....nothing happens to you as you get within 1 meter...10 centimeters...1 millimeter of the surface. You are still weightless and traveling in your inertial frame towards the star Sirius. Then, as your feet make contact with the surface through, for instance, magnetic pads in your shoes, you are wrenched out of your free-fall, inertial frame of reference into a new accelerated frame of reference where your body is now 'forced' by its magnetic or frictional contact ( rubber soled shoes) with the rotating cylinder, to follow a circular path.

It is at this moment that your body will feel a 1-G constant acceleration for as long as you remain attached to the surface. The moment you release both feet from this surface, the inertia of your body will 'remember' its last velocity vector and following Newton's Law will take you on a straight-line path until you once again crash into the surface of the cylinder and are then re-accelerated to the 1-G condition. Playing baseball in such a rotating cylinder would be a very interesting prospect. I have not considered the details of the mechanics of such a system, but there is no force like gravity than reaches out to tough you unless you are in physical contact with the surface, at which point centrifugal forces equal 1-G with the proper radius and rotation speed of the cylinder.


Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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