When the elevator is stopped, the 2 forces are equal and reverse, and the online drive is zero. However in case you’re accelerating upward, the online drive should even be upward. This implies the conventional drive exceeds the gravitational drive (proven by the lengths of the 2 arrows above). So that you really feel heavier when the conventional drive will increase. We will name the conventional drive your “obvious weight.”
Get it? You are on this field and it appears to be like like nothing’s altering, however you’re feeling your self being pulled downward by stronger gravity. That is as a result of your body of reference, the seemingly immobile elevator automobile, is in reality zooming upward. Mainly, we’re shifting from how you see it contained in the system to how somebody exterior the system sees it.
Might you construct an elevator on the moon and have it speed up quick sufficient to regain your earthly weight? Theoretically, yeah. That is what Einstein’s equivalence precept states: There isn’t any distinction between a gravitational subject and an accelerating reference body.
A Roundabout Answer
However you see the issue: To maintain accelerating upward for even a couple of minutes, the elevator shaft must be absurdly tall, and also you’d quickly attain equally ridiculous speeds. However wait! There’s one other technique to produce an acceleration: transfer in a circle.
This is a physics riddle for you: What are the three controls in a automobile that make it speed up? Reply: the fuel pedal (to hurry up), the brake (to decelerate), and the steering wheel (to vary course). Sure, all of those are accelerations!
Bear in mind, acceleration is the speed of change of velocity, and this is the important thing factor: Velocity in physics is a vector. It has a magnitude, which we name its velocity, however it additionally has a particular course. Flip the automobile and also you’re accelerating, even when your velocity is unchanged.
So what in case you simply drove in a circle? You then’d be continuously accelerating with out going wherever. That is referred to as centripetal acceleration (ac), which suggests center-pointing: An object transferring in a circle is accelerating towards the middle, and the magnitude of this acceleration is determined by the velocity (v) and the radius (R):
Courtesy of Rhett Allain
