This fogs my brain every time I watch one of these shows and I feel like maybe I’m completely misunderstanding the physics.
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You’re in a “ring” ship. The ring spins. You’re standing on the inside of the ring so it takes you along with it, and the force created “pins” you to the floor, like a carnival ride. Ok, fine.
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But that’s not gravity, and it’s not “down”. Gravity is acceleration, so what keeps the acceleration going in the ring ship is that you are constantly changing your angular momentum because you’re going in a circle. Ok, so when you let go of something, like a cup or a book, wouldn’t it go flying towards the floor at an angle? If you jumped wouldn’t you look like you rotated a little before you hit the ground, because you’d, for that moment, be continuing the momentum of your angular velocity from when you left the floor and the room would continue on it’s new, ever turning, course?
Wouldn’t it kind of feel like walking “uphill” one direction and “downhill” the other, with things sliding about as the room “changed” direction constantly?
Am I just COMPLETELY missing this idea and creating a cause and effect that doesn’t exist?
In: Physics
It gets better, or worse, when you think about it.
If you’re rollerblading in one direction in the ring, you’ll experience less and less “gravity”, until finally you’ve cancelled out the speed, and are now in freefall.
Go the other way around the ring, and your effective weight doubles!.
It would be a terrible environment for parkour, too. The place you’re trying to land would move away before you arrive.
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