The Expanse

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Reading the books for the first time. How unreasonable is my gripe about thrust "gravity"? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 2 days ago by ech@lemmy.ca to c/theexpanse@lemmy.world

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With the show being one of my favorites, I'm happy to say that I'm really enjoying the novels as well. That said, it keeps bugging me when the term "thrust gravity" is always used to describe something that's explicitly Newton's 3rd law - ie, not gravity. I'm probably not understanding something, but it bugs me to see a series that makes a point to be at least reasonably scientific to use a term that seems so wrong.

Side note: How come the third law missed out on natural feeling shorthand? 1st - inertia. 2nd - f=ma. 3rd - ???. Feels like something got overlooked there.

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[–] ech@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

Force is the effect, gravity is the cause. Gravity, thrust, and spin accelerate us or other objects and it's our interaction other objects that we feel. So "thrust gravity" is taking two concepts that work similarly and mashing them together. Like, if someone called an electric stove "electric gas", that is just the two things used to create heat, but nothing about the heat itself. It's a misuse of the terms.