Scigolf Presents Jack Kuykendall's Myths of Golf - #2 - The Scientific Explanation of Centrifugal Force

Scientific Explanation of Centrifugal Force

Since the golf industry as a whole has misunderstood centrifugal force, what is the correct scientific explanation for what centrifugal force is?

An excellent book designed for people not educated in physics is "The Cartoon Guide To Physics" by Larry Gonick. On page 59, 60 and 61, he explains in excellent cartoons that SOME FORCES ARE FICTITIOUS!

His explanation is as follows:

"Recall the accelerometer ball we hung from Ringo's roll ball". It hangs backward when he accelerates, but why?"

"There are only two real forces on the ball: Gravity which pulls downward with magnitude mg, and the tension T on the string. When Ringo accelerates, the total of these two must point forward with magnitude 'ma', by Newton's second law - so the string must hang at an angle. But, Ringo in the car imagines a strange "acceleration force" pushing everything backwards! But there is nothing doing the pushing. The 'FORCE' IS FICTITIOUS, an effect of INERTIA resisting the car's acceleration."

"All the sideways and back and forth forces you feel while driving are FICTITIOUS, the results of your inertia resisting acceleration.""

"When I swing a ball on a string, around my head, many people would say that "CENTRIFUGAL FORCE" keeps the string taut. But there is actually no force pulling the ball out. There is nothing out there pulling the ball.

CENTRIFUGAL FORCE IS FICTITIOUS!

The only force pulling on the ball is that of the string, pulling toward the center of the circle - a CENTRIPETAL force. This force is non-zero, so the ball must be accelerating"

"And indeed it is! It is accelerating towards the center of the circle, as all objects in circular motion do. What keeps the string taut? The ball's INERTIA. This inertia would make it fly tangentially away, but the string pulls it continually inward - just like the earth pulling the moon in a circular orbit."

"An amusement park offers several fictitious forces. Loot at the ROTOR: People enter a cylinder, which rotates, pressing them against the wall - then the floor drops away, leaving them pinned to the wall. The people inside the rotor feel the fictitious CENTRIFUGAL force pushing them outward. But outside observers know there is only a centripetal force from the wall pushing the riders inward into circular motion."

"Another book that illustrates all the above very nicely is "Conceptual Physics by Paul G. Hewitt. From pages 122 to 125, he explains the same things that Larry Gonick does and adds another example that is easy to visualize. It is clothes in a clothes dryer. You are not taking the water out of the clothes, you are taking the clothes out of the water. The water goes through the holes at a tangent to the tub, while the clothes are moved inward in a circle.

From my college days in the 6o's, my first quarter physics book on mechanics, "Elementary Classical Physics" by Weidner and Sells, uses calculus to show that CENTRIFUGAL FORCE is fictitious and they state on Page 204":

"The term centrifugal force is also used in discussion of circular motion, often misleadingly. A centrifugal force does not exist when one applies Newton's laws in an inertial frame. The centrifugal force is a fictitious force introduced to describe motion in a rotating, and therefore noninertial, reference frame."
"In an accelerating system, fictitious forces appear. A non-accelerating observer can describe the motion with real forces and Newton's Laws."

This is another example of how you learn IN SPITE OF
and NOT BECAUSE OF!

Just because someone believes a perception does not mean they are not performing reality.