I don't know, but it makes sense to me that all that mass would hold its inertia for a very long time.

Newt, I gotta tell ya, there is no quicker way to stop than locking up all four wheels, other than spinning in the other direction on a dry surface to kill inertia (makes it worse on ice). You just have no control. ABS brake systems actually increase the distance needed to stop, they just provide the ability to control and turn at the same time.

The law of inertia is that things tend to do what they are already doing. That would mean staying still if they were let go.
That may explain the opposite force that moves the feather strands and gravity takes over, opposing the inertia - even though it is a very small amount.

My guess would be Inertia. Even in a vacuum objects have Inertia.

"Inertial mass is the mass of an object measured by its resistance to acceleration"

Deformable objects might deform slightly as they accelerate (feather).
However, their center of gravity is the same as a rigid object (bowling ball)

@eric3579 and @dag -
I thought about that...but the entire feather is under the same gravity, so being accelerated at the same rate. Without anything to disrupt that, like air, I was confused. If you wave the feather in a vacuum, it would make sense because the force would travel through the quill then out to each 'strand' (just like the flag 'waving' on the moon when they moved it)...but being dropped as it was, it didn't make sense to me. Perhaps it's not near a perfect vacuum, only close enough to do the experiment?

My alternate guess is moment of inertia...but I can't fully explain why.

Most of those street crashes came from people not realizing that sometimes hitting the gas even HARDER is your safest course of action.

Trying to do a straight burnout, starts to drift, lifts off the gas, keeps drifting, crashes. If they had just matted the gas and did a doughnut, the inertia would be bled off by the ass end, causing the fronts to stick and spin them away from the various objects.

Actually, you might not understand what the "Uncanny Valley" hypothesis is. It's not simply CG/Humanoid Traits that are not quite realistic. What you're possibly interpreting as "Uncanny Valley" is that the visuals are attempting to appear realistic, but not fooling anyone. There are some elements of the Uncanny Valley here, but possibly not what you were thinking of or what the original poster meant by how it "looks".
The difference between what the Uncanny Valley and this video is that the characters are not meant to be mimicking realism. There are many, many traits here that are cues to an intentionally stylized art direction. The anatomy of the characters is exaggerated, both in the facial forms and body structure. The lighting and materials are certainly drawing from real-world principles, but is far off the mark if you're attempting to portray photo-realistic CG. These are intentional choices by the artists and art directors. It would be a mistake to look at this for how it "fails" to convince you it's real, because it's not meant to.
Where it does enter the Uncanny Valley is in the animation. The immediate loss of inertia displayed by the beheaded horse at the beginning. The animation after the witch jumps onto the horse (is that supposed to be Merigold? They give her less character every time), are physically inaccurate. The best way to describe the Uncanny Valley is to look at things from 20 years hence. In that time, people who may play this game would look at the lighting and rendering as simply early CG, whereas anyone paying attention to the animation, particularly the layman, would see it as "just wrong" because it violates what we subconsciously understand about how the universe works.

Disclaimer: I'm an artist and animator with a lot of experience, and it's not my intention to be offensive, and it's not my intention to say it's not my intention to be offensive while still knowingly being offensive, so I hope that my comment makes a difference.

All ships have rotational inertia, provided you turn off flight assist mode. Without flight assist, you can fly with close to full Newtonian movement, with some exceptions that were made to keep combat fun. (For example, there is a speed limit cap, to prevent dogfights from degrading into high speed flybys.) This means that with flight assist off, any movement you make, you must make a counter-movement for to stop. This includes all 6 degrees of movement, from translational to rotational. Often, players will disable flight-assist to get into an advantageous position when maneuvering, then re-enable it so they can aim more easily. There are a few, VERY good players that can fight with flight-assist off completely, and it's a sight to behold:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwVYc_iPAvg

In any case, E:D is looking very promising, despite getting a lot less attention than Star Citizen, and even No Man's Sky. Of all the upcoming space sims, this is the one I'm looking forward to most.

Hmmmm...it looked to me like the smaller ships didn't have rotational inertia. That's disappointing.
Looked purty!

That's a good point actually, if the wind was strong enough, the bike would be tilted right over to counterbalance it, but without the inertia of cornering, so you'd have your body pressed against the side of the bike.

That article is terrible. For a start, they have the whole flat earth thing completely backwards. It was a scientific consensus that eventually convinced the ruling (religion based) culture that the earth was round, because of the evidence.

Exactly what is happening now with climate change.

But I'll grant that they certainly have better climate change credentials than anyone here. That doesn't make them right. What would make them right would be publishing a peer reviewed paper with new models and predictions and falsifiable results.

Anyway, a few seconds googling sees them pretty much torn to shreds.
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2014/02/20/mcnider-and-christy-defend-inertia/

Im' starting think that climate deniers genuinely don't understand the scientific method. It's simple; if there wasn't significant evidence that AGW was happening then it would be torn apart by other scientists. That's what peer review is for.

Cyclist here too, have been for 35 years... The most traffic laws i break involve things that stops me using the only advantage over walking, inertia. That means running on red lights is common but only if it's totally empty crossing.. People who use motors to go forward don't have to use muscles so it doesn't always enter their minds that cyclists rely on rolling forward all the time, stopping as few times as possible. That's why cyclists need to bend the rules pretty often, it just works a lot better for all of us. Of course i could stop at red lights, specially if it's button activated, i could reserve that 20s instead of using 3s making everyone wait... But here it has been a lot more common to use cycles and drivers do behave well on intersections letting that momentum to carry us over and saving time from everyone. We just can't count on it, i would say 80% do it well, it's that 20% that feels hurt if they have to yeild to a puny sack of meat riding on a tubular frame..

Last winter was brutal, instead of snow we had ice that melted a bit during the day and froze overnight. Then it was a case of survival with a bike and things from my teens started to bother me: cars that don't understand they cant tip over and hurt them selves, going thru safe, dry routes became a real fight. When i was school age, i had to to cycle on the road, with cars, no shoulder cause of snowbanks, just four deep tracks that the cars had made. The times the car horns scared me when the motorists blamed me for driving on the only piece of road i could do so, width of maybe 20cm with ice on both sides.. man., you couldn't get out of those without falling spectacularly while the cars of course could, they just were lazy. Now a days there is a cycle road built separately there but the attitude became obvious "roads are for cars, if you don't have one, stay at home..."

Actually I'm about as English as they come but crucially I spent my advanced academic career studying Philosophy and rhetoric (lamentably only to Hons. due to laziness) and consequently have an ingrained habit of arguing around a problem rather than relying on established parameters (not always entirely helpful when discussing more day to day matters as I'm sure you've by now gathered but it is essential to working with advanced epistemological problems and so serves me well none the less). I'm also prone to poor punctuation and odd patterns of grammar when I'm not going back over everything I write with a fine tooth comb which has likely not helped. (A consequence of learning to describe tangent after tangent when trying to thoroughly encapsulate some conceptual problems with language alone)

That said, while I may have gone around the houses so to speak I think my conclusion is entirely compatible with what I now understand your own to be.

I didn't want to describe my original counter-point by simply working with the idea that weight is lower on the moon relative to the earth (though I did not try to refute this either) because that would not illustrate why a 2-300kg man in a space suit still takes some shifting (relatively speaking) even if there were no gravity at all. (Would have been faster to just crunch some numbers but that's not what I specialise in)

Sure you could move anything with any force in 0G (which I do understand is technically relative as every object in the universe with mass exerts gravitational forces proportionately (and inversely proportional to the distance between)) but the resulting velocity is directly proportional to mass vs force applied. Weight here then, can be seen as another competing force in the equation rather than the whole thing which it can be convenient to treat it as for a simple calculation (which is what I think you are doing).

To put that another way I was applying a different/deeper linguistic/descriptive paradigm to the same objective facts because that's what we philosophers do. Single paradigm approaches to any subject have a dangerous habit of making one believe one possess such a thing as truly objective facts rather than interpretations only (which are all that truly exist).


In other terms weight alone isn't the whole story (as I assume you well know). Overcoming inertia due to mass scales up all by itself, then gravity comes along and complicates matters. This is why rocket scientists measure potential thrust in DeltaV rather than Watts, Joules etc. right? The mass of the object dictates how much velocity a given input/output of energy would equal.

Gravity and thus the force in newtons it induces (weight) in these terms is an additional force which depending upon the direction in which it is acting multiplies the required DeltaV to achieve the same effect. Moreover when concerning a force of inconstant nature (such as pushing up/jumping or a brief burn of an engine) brings duration into play also. (the foundations of why rocket science gets its fearsome reputation for complexity in its calculations)


Man on the moon lies on the ground and pushes off to try and stand back up.
This push must impart enough DeltaV to his body to produce a sufficient velocity and duration to travel the 2 meters or so needed to get upright so he can then balance the downward gravitational force with his legs&back and successfully convert the chemical/kinetic energy from his arms into potential energy as weight (the energy he uses to stand up is the same energy that would drag him down again right?).

One could practically speaking reduce this to a simple calculation of weight and thrust if all one wanted was a number. Weight would be the only number we need here as it incorporates the mass in it's own calculation (weight = mass x gravity)

But where's the fun in that? My way let's one go round all the houses see how the other bits of the paradigm that support this basic isolated equation function and inter-relate.

Plus (and probably more accurately) I've been playing loads of Kerbal Space Programme lately and have ended up conditioning myself to think in terms of rocketry and thus massively overcomplicated everything here for basically my own amusement/fascination.


Basically few things are more verbose and self indulgent than a bored Philosopher, sorry .


Re: Your challenge. (And I'm just guessing here) something to do with your leg muscles not being able to deliver the energy fast/efficiently enough? (as your feet would leave the ground faster/at a lower level of force?). This is the only thing I can think of as it's easier to push away from things underwater and it certainly looks difficult to push away hard from things when people are floating in 0g.

So lower resistance from gravity = less force to push against the floor with?

Warm? Even in the Ballpark? (Regardless I'm really pleased to discover you weren't the nut I originally thought you to be! (though I imagine you now have some idea what a nut I am))


If I got any of that wrong I'd be happy for you to explain to me why and where (assuming you can keep up with my slightly mad approach to syntax in the 1st place). I'm an armchair physicist (not that I haven't studied it in my time but I'm far from PHD) I'm always happy to learn and improve.

Were you not paying attention in physics class the day they explained the difference between mass and weight? As @Payback pointed out the energy required to overcome inertia is the same no matter what the gravity, low gravity simply allows you to "spread the duration" of the force like a fulcrum.

I.e. it would be easier than on earth but you still have to apply enough force to move 2-300kg of mass, you just have the option of doing so less rapidly (making it easier but not easy).

Even if this were not the case your argument still makes no sense. If it was indeed faked then surely they were on wires anyway? How else are you proposing they replicated the effects of low gravity?

The fact your comment got 3 likes is rather depressing. As someone who makes researching conspiracy theories a borderline obsessive hobby I can say with some confidence that the whole faked moon landing thing is about the most debunk-able one ever conceived. It is an insult to the very term "conspiracy theory" and helps give the rest of us a bad name .

Radiation belt? = 7 mins of expertly calculated exposure, there is a 1000ish page NASA manual on how they did this.

Cameras? = they had about 20 DIFFERENT cameras & much like anyone else would the crappy poorly framed or exposed shots weren't used for publicity

Multiple light sources? = The surface of the moon is both highly reflective and uneven. (mythbusters did the shit out of that one)

Most complicated machine ever built? = Actually launched, several times, to the freaking moon and back!

Waving flag? = Funny how every single shot of the flag waving is when someone is holding/touching it eh? (& what kind of retard leaves evidence of wind in the most expensive coverup of all time?)

The Russian space programme? = They just turned a blind eye to their arch rivals lauding it over them? They were in on it? You have to get really paranoid before that one starts to make any sense whatsoever.

etc. etc. etc.

I have a lot of time for conspiracy theories and I'm happy to speculate with the best of them but I've yet to find a single good argument for the landing not happening. I can maybe work with the possibility that some things were omitted/covered up (Monoliths etc.) because this could not be conclusively refuted by empirical facts. Suggesting that it never happened however is so easy to disprove it blows my mind that people still have time for the idea.

For your own sake try looking into the opposing arguments. There are plenty people with PHD's and direct experience who are happy to take you through the counters to all this stuff. And they back it up with actual evidence and experiments rather than conjecture and selective information. Your mind will thank you for it

The suit is "armored" and inflated, so he has to "bounce" because his range of motion is limited by air pressure and the rigidity of the material required to block the sun's radiation. So, if he laid down, not only would moon dust screw up stuff as @AnomalousDatum says, it would be harder to get up, as the suit wouldn't allow for typical bending of knees and arms, and almost no hip movement at all.

There's also the fact that his inertia is exactly the same. Pushing up his 200+ lbs, and the mass of the suit, would still be very difficult.