Why does centrifugal force not exist

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Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Does centrifugal force exist? Ask Question. Asked 7 years, 6 months ago. Active 1 year, 8 months ago. Viewed 74k times. Improve this question. Dylan Dylan 1 1 gold badge 9 9 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges. It's not real; what you are feeling is inertia. What you feel is the effect other objects have on you as they accelerate and you remain momentarily in your own inertial frame.

Suppose you mass M are in a bucket mass m connected by a spring mass 0 to a fixed centre. You and the bucket are whirling around. What are the forces? There is a centripetal force of Ma on you. There is an outward force of Ma from you on the bucket. That's the reaction force to your centripetal force.

It's real. I think that is what nonphysicists call centrifugal force. Show 6 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Details As you know, Newton's laws work in so-called " inertial frames of reference ".

Improve this answer. Venemo Venemo 1 1 gold badge 6 6 silver badges 10 10 bronze badges. Add a comment. To quote wikipedia: A fictitious force is an apparent force that acts on all masses whose motion is described using a non-inertial frame of reference, such as a rotating reference frame.

Charles Goodwin 2 2 bronze badges. Dominic Hofer Dominic Hofer 4 4 silver badges 6 6 bronze badges. Now, to address your original question: Does centrifugal force exist? See the other answers for this. Yes , in the sense of it being useful at a certain level of prediction to model certain things without too much abstraction.

Similarly certain things can be explained in chemistry with certain "laws" which physics can predict in a more complex and abstract form. This doesn't mean the chemical laws do not exist, they simply are less abstract.

David Mulder David Mulder 2 2 silver badges 13 13 bronze badges. Although I think you have the abstractions wrong - the deeper you go, the less abstractions you have, not the other way around. Abstractions are handy to protect you against unnecessary complexities - e. But calculating friction based on EMF? Oh boy. I - and the philosophy of science if memory serves me right - tend to see abstraction as going farther from the simple observations made in reality. This makes sense if you look at the development of science from a macroscopic perspective through time, but seems odd to someone who is taught forces like the centrifugal force form the beginning as a simpler perspective on the "real deal".

Regardless, how could science explain things? Show 9 more comments. Superbest Superbest 2, 1 1 gold badge 13 13 silver badges 25 25 bronze badges. The reason you don't keep rotating around the centre while moving exponentially outward is that once you start moving out there is a Coriolis force that makes you fall behind, and once you start falling behind the Coriolis force slows your outward motion.

The centrifugal force is not the only fictitious force you need. When you get flung away from the merry go round, the reference frame keeps rotating with it and fictitious forces must still be included; someone watching from the merry go round will see you follow a curved path.

Someone watching from the ground does not need any fictitious forces. That's just what "frame of reference" means. Consider an object initially "at rest" that is to say, at some instant in time it is rotating with the frame of reference , but nothing is in place to keep it rotating. Like spinning something on a string in a circle and then releasing just at the instant we start to calculate its motion.

Let time run from that initial point. A bit like gravity in general relativity is a by-product of choosing an "unnatural" frame of reference, one that fails to follow the curvature of space-time ;- Note that in both frames of reference, inertial or rotating, an object that remains stationary in the rotating frame and rotates in a circle in the inertial frame necessarily experiences a "centripetal force" a force towards the centre.

Steve Jessop Steve Jessop 4 4 silver badges 7 7 bronze badges. Is the force towards the outside what is called the "reactive centrifugal force"? I just hadn't heard that phrase or if I have heard it didn't remember it. Here's sample image of circular motion and centrifugal and centripetal force acting on an object: source: explainthatstuff.

Glorfindel 1, 1 1 gold badge 14 14 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges. G B G B 1, 1 1 gold badge 10 10 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges. It is certainly true that there are mathematical mechanisms for doing physics in non-inertial frames, but the are a complicating factor; it should be emphasized that the laws of physics have their simplest form in inertial frames. The first sentence says "Centrifugal force is force that pulls rotating object away from the center of rotation".

Yet, in an inertial frame, the object accelerates towards the centre. There is no force pulling the object away from the centre, there is a force pulling it toward the centre; this force is centripetal.

But I don't know how the animation is showing centrifugal force and maybe this is what you are talking about in your comment. Those three laws don't give any direct advice about doing physics in non-inertial frames. Way to identify real forces If you examine a single physical situation from several frame of reference, 2 some "forces" that you see may change their direction or magnitude between frames, while others will remain stubbornnly the same.

The problem is with the boy and the girl on the merry-go-round. They see the ball NOT going in a straight line. Since they understand force and motion, they are saying "hey - if it is not moving in a straight line, there must be a force on it". They make a good point. However, they are not in an inertial frame of reference.

Their frame is actually accelerating because it is moving in a circle. In order for things to work out in a non-intertial frame, a force needs to be added a non-real force. This force is the centrifugal force. The centrifugal force is the force non-real force that is needed to make things work as you would think in a reference frame that is accelerating.

The best example is when you are in a car that is turning. If the car is turning left, it FEELS like there is a force pushing you to the right in your frame of reference inside the car. This would correctly be called the centrifugal force. The only real problem is that if you call the centrifugal force a real as in fundamental interaction force. So, in the end, most people don't really need either of these terms. Of the two, centrifugal is the more needed but also more likely to be used incorrectly.

First, are they real forces? Rather it is caused by the rotation of the reference frame. The centrifugal force is not some psychological oddity humans experience. It affects everything in a rotating reference frame, not just the humans. The earth bulges out at the equator because of the centrifugal force. Geosynchronous satellites those that hover constantly over the same spot on earth depend on the centrifugal force exactly canceling gravity so that the satellite remains stationary in the earth's reference frame.

The eye of a hurricane the calm spot in the middle is caused because the centrifugal force cancels the air pressure gradient force at that point. When the hurricane air that is spiraling inwards due to the pressure difference hits the point where it gains enough centrifugal force, it stops.

Topics: centrifugal , centrifugal force , force , inertia , inertial force , reference frame , rotational motion. A common physics demonstration involves using a flat whiteboard with a tennis ball on top of it. The whiteboard is carried along in a straight-line path; the ball rest on top of the whiteboard and follows the same straight-line path.

Then suddenly, the board is turned leftward to begin a circular motion; yet the ball keeps moving straight. Ultimately, the ball rolls off the right-edge of the board and continues in its straight-line inertial path. Without an unbalanced force on the ball, the ball continues in its original motion. The whiteboard merely moved out from under the ball as it makes its turn.

If you could watch carefully, then you could view the ball's path from the perspective of an airborne camera. It's a no brainer - the ball moves straight while the whiteboard turns. And finally, the ball travels off the "outside edge" of the whiteboard. Relative to the circular motion of the whiteboard, the ball moves away from the center of the circle.

But explaining the motion of the ball does not require that we imagine or dream up the existence of an outward or centrifugal force. The motion of the ball is explained by the tendency of an object in motion to continue in motion in the same direction.

Now suppose that a block is attached to the top of the whiteboard on the "outside" of the ball with such an orientation that it would apply an inward force upon the ball. When the whiteboard is turned, the block would turn as well and supply the centripetal force required to move the ball in a circle. Without the block, the ball would have moved along the straight-line path, moving to position 1 after say 0.

But with the block supplying an inward force, the ball moves inward towards the center of the circle relative to its straight-line path. Instead of being at position 1, the ball is closer to the center at position 1'.