Why is it that when something pushes/pulls on me, I feel acceleration, but I don’t feel acceleration from the earth’s gravity? I feel a force pushing upward on me, but I don’t feel a downward force.
In: Physics
While it’s technically true that you can understand this in terms of gravity not being a force, there *are* forces that you can imagine that would feel the same:
When you feel acceleration, it’s usually because you’re feeling the forces and differences as one bit of your body gets accelerated then has to transfer that force up to the rest of you.
If someone shakes your hand, and you hold it loose, the hand moves and the arm moves with it, but the rest of you stays still, and you can feel force on the skin of your hand, and fleeting forces in your arm. If you hold it stiff, you feel the force constantly as they try to move it in your muscles and tendons.
But if someone could use some kind of tractor beam thing that applied a force evenly everywhere in your body at once, you wouldn’t feel it, because every part would be moving together and would not create these changes that we feel.
Something pretty similar to this is being in water, where even if technically the water is holding you up, because of how it flows, what this actually feels like is a buoyancy that holds you up, and a water pressure that pushes uniformly onto your skin.
If there was some way to uniformly salt up water and make you float more, I expect that you would not feel an acceleration, because the change in buoyancy would apply uniformly to your entire body.
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