Comment

Comment by layer8

It’s absolute in the sense that you can determine your acceleration without any external reference. You feel a certain force (like what you feel in an elevator). That’s your acceleration. You don’t accelerate relative to Earth, or relative to anything else. You accelerate relative to when you wouldn’t be accelerating (your inertial rest frame, a state of free fall).

If you are in space accelerating and the Earth would decelerate (which is just an acceleration in the other direction), you would still feel exactly the same force (minus Earth’s gravity, to the small extent you’d still feel it), and people on the Earth would feel the Earth’s acceleration. (For them it would feel like “down” isn’t perpendicular to the Earth’s surface anymore, or as if the Earth’s surface was tilted.)

When you sit on a chair on Earth, the pressure you feel on your butt is your acceleration upwards. If there was no chair and no ground (and no air), so that you’d be in free fall, that’s when you’d have zero acceleration. Your inertial rest frame is the trajectory you’d take in free fall. When you’re sitting on a chair, or lying in bed, or standing on the ground, you’re accelerating upwards relative to that rest frame, and that’s the pressure you feel on your butt, or on your body, or under your feet.

parent layer8 7 months ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton