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In article <3sapbs$nts@dingo.cc.uq.oz.au>, davidcs@psych.psy.uq.oz.au (David Smyth) writes: > I just know the physicists are going to tell me what I just said is > incorrect - and they are right according to General Relativity. The > pendulum would rotate due to gravitational effects of the rest of the > rotating universe if the earth was stationary. My apologies to > the Swami (even if I still think he did fall out of a very tall tree). Nope, it can't work that way. You were right the first time. If you were at the center of a rotating sphere of matter, there would be no force causing you to begin rotating. (No, don't anyone invoke Mach's principle. That would be the same thing as insisting that the Earth is not stationary, but the flat-heads start from a position that explicitly violates Mach's principle.) The only way to synchronize the motion of the pendulum to some gravitational source would be through tidal forces (like the moon always keeping one face towards the Earth). The tidal forces from sources outside the solar system are essentially zero by symmetry (there is a tiny one from the galactic center, a smaller one from the Virgo cluster, etc). The only tidal force to synchronize the pendulum would be from the moon, and to a lesser extent from the sun. But lo and behold, a pendulum at the North pole (shouldn't matter where, since the Earth is flat, right?) is synchronized not to the motion of the moon, but to the motions of the isotropically distributed distant galaxies. The only conclusion, if one still wants to say the Earth is flat, is that angular momentum is not conserved. -- K. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kevin L. Sterner | U. Penn. High Energy Physics | Smash the welfare state! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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