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Old 2012-09-16, 12:28   Link #73
Raiga
tl;dr
 
 
Join Date: Jan 2009
Age: 32
Aight, the wording of "forces stemming from inertia" is still going to bother me but I'll avoid nitpicking on that too much.

Generating an extremely powerful, localized, uniform gravitational field means rewriting most of Einstein and all of quantum mechanics. Such a field does not exist in nature, even near extremely massive objects such as black holes (the force gradient would tear your body apart). An infinitely long (or sufficiently long) massive slab might approximate a powerful uniform field, but it would not be localized (and also does not exist in nature). If I take for granted that such a field is impossible, then that's why.

However, I'll take you up on your hypothetical. If it were possible to create a tunnel of uniform high magnitude gravitational field then you are right, a passenger travelling in it would experience free fall and have no sensation of acceleration at all.

Now what happens when this field tunnel is "turned on"? A discontinuous off/on is going to generate a divergent amount of jerk (the derivative of acceleration) which would be a safety concern for roller coasters and the like (higher derivatives of position are rarely important). Would that be dangerous in this uniform field tunnel? Maybe, maybe not. There's no empirical data for this stuff because we simply can't duplicate it.

There is a lot that would be possible "if", but sometimes the "if" is just too hard to swallow. If Keshe could break a few hundred laws of our current understanding of physics, then yes, he could do all the things he claims in the video, but considering that more or less anything is possible under that "if", it's a bit silly to speculate.
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