Gravity Hard-Coded Into The Brain

guiding_knight writes: "A study by French scientists suggests that gravity is imprinted in the human brain. Interesting article, tells of human ability to calculate effects of Earth-normal gravity and how difficult it is to adapt to another model."

Comments

Re:What a ridiculous notion

[taion]

Indeed, what a ridiculous post.

First, your figure of "100 million years" seems to have been completely fabricated. Care to back that up?

Your number for day length of 100 MYA is also rather off. Day length change is approximately 2 milliseconds per century, meaning that even 100 MYA, the day could not have been more than 2000 seconds (considerably less than 6 hours) shorter than it is currently. The actual day length was actually longer than what these quick calculations indicate, given changing rates, but your numbers are completely out of the ballpark.

In addition, your very concept of gravity seems to be off. Gravity is the attraction of two bodies with definite mass, and is equal to G_c*m_1/d^2. Rotational speed doesn't affect gravity at all -- only mass does.

Heck, you even contradict yourself, not to mention practically all scientific knowledge we have. A weaker gravitational force means a lower gravitational acceleration constant, which is rather inconsistent with your figure of 15.2 m/s^2, which is rather more than the 9.8 m/s^2 we have now!

Good scientific proof

[Macrobat]

To my knowledge, no video game actually affects the equilibrium of your inner ear, so even playing a game with non-earth (by which I presume you mean zero-g) physics will not convince your brain that it is in a free-fall environment.

But what irks me about your post is the comment, "baby's on a glass table are scared, ya, that is really good scientific proof." Do you even know what that experiment is, who conducted it, and what were the follow-up studies? It's one of the classics of developmental psychology. And they were careful not to draw too many conclusions from it. But it does support (not prove, nor does it claim to) the notion that our sense of gravity is innate.

Re:TROLL!

[taion]

I didn't mention centrifugal force because it had no relevance to debunking what the original poster stated. The original post gave a value of 'g' of 15.2 m/s^2 if the Earth rotated faster, corresponding to INCREASED gravity.

Of course, this has no grounding in fact, as gravitational force relates only to the masses of the objects in question and the distance separating them, and neither the mass of the Earth nor its radius has changed significantly enough to change the value of g to only one decimal place.

Presumably, the original poster was referencing the apparent force felt by objects on the Earth. Assuming the presumed increased centrifugal force to be significant, that would mean that g would instead be less than its current value --- the exact opposite of the larger value of g that the post gives.

Now then, if we wish to calculate the effect of centrifugal force... F_c = mv^2/r, so a_c = v^2/r, where v is the velocity, and r is the distance from the centre of the circle. v is proportional to 1/t, so using 86400 s and 84400 s, we get a change of less than 5% as a rough figure.

Now, calculating a_c, we use the Earth's rotational velocity and the radius for v and r. At the equator, these are approximately 460 m/s and 6378.1 km, respectively. Using the formula for a_c, we obtain a figure of approximately 0.03 m/s^2 at the equator, and values that decrease the further we get from the equation. A 5% change on 0.03 m/s^2 gives us less than 0.002 m/s^2, which is hardly even detectable without highly sensitive instruments!

The estimated change in centrifugal force at the equator from 100 MYA is less than 0.02% of g --- which is hardly even noticeable!