Quote:
Originally Posted by RL Clown
3. If the Earth was really rotating about its axis, then we would actually feel the Earth rotate. The round-supporters say, "Well, since you're moving with the Earth, you don't really feel it rotating. It's kinda like you're in a car. You're moving along with the car, so you don't really feel the car moving." But I'm not buying it... Obviously, when I'm in a car, I can still feel the car moving. So if the Earth was really rotating about its axis, human beings would feel the rotation
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You would not feel motion in the horizontal direction if you were traveling at constant velocity in a car. Most cars are always speeding up and slowing down and the vertical forces from shocks and road aberations are felt too. Also, any time you turn in a car, you are changing your velocity vector which is is acceleration (you push against the opposite direction of the turn because of inertia - your body wants to keep going straight but the seat and car interior are pushing you around the turn.)
This is how accelerometers in the brain work too - they are physical sensory organs in our brain, tubes filled with fluid that can account for both angular and linear acceleration because of their geometry and the way hair cells and membranes interpret motion of the fluids (which is translated into a neural signal that you can percieve). When you are traveling at a constant velocity, the fluid is static and the hair cells are firing tonically. This is the case whether you are traveling at 10kph or 5000kph.
However, accelerating to 5000kph too quickly would crush you. Well, technically, accelerating too quickly to 10kph could crush you just as easily as the impulse imparted has to do with the change in velocity divided by time over which that velocity changed. Which is a huge number as that time period approaches zero even for a small velocity change.
Which is what happens when you hit the ground from a big fall. Your velocity goes very quckly to zero in a small time.