Quote:
Originally Posted by Profpat  It answers not only the question of, if the toilet drains in a clockwise here in America does it drain counter- clockwise in Australia. ...
In the inertial frame of reference (upper part of the picture), the black object moves in a straight line. However, the observer (red dot) who is standing in the rotating frame of reference (lower part of the picture) sees the object as following a curved path.
The Coriolis effect. |
The more I watch that animation, the more mesmerizing it seems. The curve highlights that the observer is oblivious to his own motion. For us, the Earth is always moving. Not only does it spin, but our orbital speed is over 65,000 MPH, and who knows the speed of our solar system as it careens around our galatic center nor the speed and motion of our galaxy in its complicated journey across the universe.
Can any of these motions, which we seemingly ignore, have any affect on our experiments leading us to believe that particles spin but, in fact, such a notion is tainted by our own motion? (Chaos theory highlights the significance of insignificance - the Butterfly Effect.) So, what if some motion affecting us is yet unknown, just as dark matter was seemingly unknown throughout all of history until the past decade or two? (I recognize that dark matter is still controversial - just like gravity.)
The Coriolis Effect keeps haunting me. Are all of our experiments and observations tainted by some other unseen and undetected motion, perhaps on a microscopic scale, which distorts what we see and believe?